Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Cytherea by Joseph Hergesheimer
page 32 of 306 (10%)

If he had been in trouble or debt, if his life had been a failure, he
would have understood his impulse; but as it was, with Fanny and Helena
and Gregory, all his flourishing affairs--why, it was insanity!
However, what absorbed him in his present state of mind, of inquiry,
was its honesty; nothing could be served by conventional protests and
nice sentiments. Lee had long wanted to escape from life, from the
accumulating limiting circumstances. Or was it death he tried to avoid?

What became clearest was that, of all the things which had happened to
him, he would not, at the beginning, have deliberately chosen any. One,
it seemed, bred by the other, had overtaken him, fastened upon him,
while he was asleep. Lee knew a man who, because of his light strength
and mastery of horses, had spent a prolonged youth riding in
gentlemen's steeplechases for the great Virginia stables; a career of
racing silk and odds and danger, of highly ornamental women and
champagne, of paddocks and formal halls and surreptitious little ante-
rooms. That he envied; and, recalling his safe ignominious usefulness
during the war, he envied the young half-drunk aviators sweeping in
reckless arcs above the fortified German cities.

Or was it, again, only youth that he lamented, conscious of its
slipping supinely from his grasp? Yet, if that were all, why was he
rebellious about the present, the future, rather than the past? Lee
Randon wasn't looking back in a self-indulgent melancholy. Nor was he
an isolated, peculiar being; yes, all the men he knew had, more or
less, his own feeling; he could think of none, even half intelligent,
who was happy. Each had Lee's aspect of having been forced into a
consummation he would not have selected, of something temporary,
hurried, apologetic.
DigitalOcean Referral Badge