She wasn't, he found, deeply interested in his explanation; she was careless of anything but the immediate present. Savina never mentioned William Grove. Animated by countless tender inventive expressions of her passion, she gave the impression of listening to the inflections of his voice rather than attending, considering, its meanings. She was more fully surrendered to the situation than he. The disorganized fragments of a hundred ideas and hints poured in rapid succession, back of his dominating emotion, through Lee's brain. He lost himself only in waves--the similitude to the sea persisted--regular, obliterating, but separate. Savina was far out in a tideless deep that swept the solidity of no land. She was plastically what he willed; blurred, drunk, with sensation, she sat clasping rigidly the edge of his coat. But his will, he discovered, was limited: the surges of physical desire, rising and inundating, saturating him, broke continually and left him with the partly-formed whirling ideas. He named, to himself, the thing that hung over them; he considered it and put it away; he deferred the finality of their emotion. In this he was inferior, he became even slightly ridiculous--they couldn't continue kissing each other with the same emphasis hour after hour, and the emphasis could not be indefinitely multiplied; rather than meet the crescendo he drew into his region of cental obscurity. Lee had to do this, he reminded himself, in view of Savina's utter surrender: he was responsible for whatever happened. Even here his infernal queerness--that the possession of the flesh wasn't what primarily moved him--was pursuing him: a peculiarity, he came to think, dangerously approaching the abnormal. In addition to that, however, he was not ready, prepared, to involve his future; for that, with Savina Grove, was most probable to follow. Fanny was by no means absent from his mind, his wife and certain practical realities. And, as he had told himself before, he was not a seducer. What adventures he had accepted had been the minor experiments of his restlessness, and they all ended in the manner that had finished him with Anette, in dissatisfaction and a sense of waste. Savina stirred and sighed. “I must ring for tea,” she said regretfully; and, while the servant arranged the pots and decanters and pitchers, the napkins and filled dishes, Lee paced up and down, smoking. When they were again alone her fingers stole under his arm: