“I'd like to tell a hundred people in New York that they could get away too, unfreeze themselves. When we drove horses I used to be surprised that they went along so quietly in blinders; they never seemed to learn that one kick would break into splinters the thing dragging on them. People are like that, I was and you were, too--in blinders. We've torn ours off, Lee. Tell me that you are glad.” He was, without reserve. Tranquilly finding his razors, he was aware of a permeating contentment in what they had done. It was exactly as Savina had said--the forces which had held them in a rigorous northern servitude had proved, upon assault, to be no more than a defense of painted prejudices, the canvas embrasures of hypocrisy. “It is astonishing, what so many people put up with,” he agreed; “but then,” Lee added, in a further understanding, “it isn't so much what you knock down as what you carry away, take everywhere, inside you. When an arrangement like ours fails, that, mostly, I suspect, is the cause. It needs a special sort of fitness. Take the hundred people you spoke of--I'd be willing to bet not five of them could get away from the past, or put out of their minds what they are brought up on. Privately they would think they were wicked, damned, or some such truck; and, sure enough, that alone would finish them.” “I haven't a speck of that,” Savina admitted serenely; “I am happy. And I don't even have to ignore the thought of your wife and children; they'll get along just as well, maybe better, without you. William doesn't need me; he hasn't for a number of years. But we had to have each other.” Lee Randon considered this in relation to his feeling that he had not left Eastlake, Fanny, because of Savina. He was still convinced that his life had fallen apart of itself; but he began to see that Savina had been more deeply involved in his act of liberty than he had suspected. Without her it was probable that he would have continued to the end in the negative existence of Eastlake; yet no amount of mere assurance that that was the only admirable, the only permissible, course was valid with him unless he had a corroborating belief. And all that he might once have possessed had left him at the final blow dealt by the passion of Savina and himself. She had been stronger than the assembled forces of heredity and precept and experience; her strength was superhuman; it was incredible that her slender body could hold such an impulse, a fury really, of vitality. Women must have been like that in earlier ages of humanity; but they were no longer; their passion had been wasted, spent, or turned aside into exhausting by-paths of sensation. He had finished shaving and, when they were dressed, they went down to breakfast in a dining-room with a marble floor and walls lustrous with bronze tiling. They had tall glasses of iced orange juice; and, with the last fragrant draught of coffee, Lee lighted a long bland cigar.