would anticipate, perhaps escape, grave trouble. Lee Randon realized,
however, that he would have to begin with the doll, Cytherea; and the
difficulty, the preposterousness, of trying to make that clear to his
wife, discouraged and kept him silent. No woman, and least of any the
one to whom he was married, could be trusted to understand his feeling,
his dissatisfaction in satisfaction, the restlessness at the heart of
his peace.

Fanny went up at once, but he lingered, with a cigar, in the living
room. A clock struck one. A photograph of Claire with her bridesmaids,
Peyton and his ushers, on a lawn, in the wide flowered hats of summer
and identical boutonnières, stood on a table against the wall; and
beyond was an early girlish picture of Fanny, in clothes already
absurdly out of mode. She had a pure hovering smile; the aspect of
innocence time had been powerless to change was accentuated; and her
hands managed to convey an impression of appeal. He had been, in the
phrase now current, crazy about her; he was still, he told himself
strictly. Well, he was ... yet he had kissed Anette; not for the first
time, either; but, he recognized, for the last. He was free of that! A
space, a phase, of his life was definitely behind him. A pervading
regret mingled with the relief of his escape from what he had finally
seen as a petty sensuality. The little might, in the sequence, be
safer, better, than the great. But he vigorously cast off that
ignominious idea. A sense of curious pause, stillness, enveloped Lee
and surprised him, startled him really, into sitting forward and
attentive. The wind had dropped, vanished into the night and sky: the
silence without was as utter as though Lee Randon were at the center of
a vacuum.