with Fanny. He wasn't, merely, the victim of a vagrant obsession, the
tyranny of a threatening fixed idea. No, the question advanced without
answer by Cytherea was not confined to her, it had very decidedly
entered into him, and touched, practically, everyone he knew, everyone,
that was, who had a trace of imagination. Existence had been enormously
upset, in a manner at once incalculable and clear, by the late war.
Why, for example, the present spirit of restlessness should
particularly affect the relation of men and women he couldn't begin to
grasp. Not, he added immediately, again, that it had clouded or shaken
his happiness.

It had only given him the desire, the safe necessity, to comprehend the
powerful emotion that held Fanny and him secure against any accident to
their love. To their love! The repetition, against his contrary
intention, took on the accent of a challenge. However, he proceeded
mentally, it wasn't the unassailable fact that was challenged, but the
indefinable word love. Admiration, affection, passion, were clear in
their meanings--but love! His brow contracted in a frown spreading in a
shadowy doubt over his face when he saw that he had almost reached the
clubhouse; its long steep-pitched bulk lay directly across the path of
dusk, approaching from the east; and a ruddy flicker in the glass doors
on the veranda showed that a fire had been lighted. To his left, down
over the dead sod and beyond a road, he could see the broad low façade
of his house with its terraced lawn and aged stripped maples. There,
too, a window was bright on the first floor: probably Fanny was hearing
the children's lessons.

* * * * *

That cheerful interior he completely visualized: Fanny, in the nicest