He left this, for the moment, and returned to what, actually, lay ahead of him. Would Savina go away with him, leave the correct William, the safety of their New York house in the style of eighteen-eighty? Lee considered in her two impulses, not alike--her overwhelming passion, herself generally; and her admission, no, cry, that she loved him, or the special part he had in her. It rather looked as though he'd be successful. It did for a fact. He had not been idle through all the day, but had drawn from the Harriman Bank twenty thousand dollars. So much had not been necessary; it was very bad business to segregate in idleness such a sum of money now; but he enjoyed the extravagance of it. Prudence, frugality, was no longer a factor in his affairs. His present personal liberty, more complete than it had ever been before--than, he added lightly, it might ever be again--was astonishingly soothing. Sitting comfortably in a room in his customary hotel, there wasn't a pressure that could be brought to bear on him. It was now twenty minutes past four, he was to go to Savina at a quarter to six, and until then there was nothing, nothing, to force him this way or that: no directors' meetings, gabbling East-lake figures, responsibility, housewife or children. He hadn't realized the extent to which he had been surrounded and confined, the imponderable mass of what he had not only been indifferent to but actually disliked. He could lie down--he had been up the entire past night--and be called in an hour; he could sit as he was, in an unbuttoned waistcoat with his legs comfortably spread out; he could motor or walk on Fifth Avenue; smoke; drink--all in an inviolable security of being. Or, going back to that moment when he had, so mistakenly, turned aside from visionary promptings to a solid comfortable career, he might--what was it?--write. Perhaps his sharp regret at the loss of his youth was premature, youth itself comparatively unimportant. But no, that would involve him in fresh distasteful efforts, imperceptibly it would build up a whole new world of responsibilities: writing would be arduous, editors captious, and articles, stories, books, tie him back again to all that from which he had so miraculously escaped. Savina would be enough. What a beautiful body, so unexpectedly full, she had; how astounding, intoxicating, was the difference between what she seemed to be and what she was. Lee Randon thought with amused pity of the files of men who must have passed by her, with the most considerate bows, in ignorance of the inner truth.