“Why, Lee!” she exclaimed, surprised; “I don't know anyone who is so decided. That's what makes me raging, you're so dogmatic. There, that is a splendid word. Don't eat that apple, it isn't baked; I can see from here.” She rang. “Varney,” Fanny addressed the maid, “take Mr. Randon's apple out and see if there isn't another better done, please. I warned you about that; he can't eat them uncooked.”
“Let me keep it,” he protested; “it might have an excellent effect on my disposition.”
“Don't interfere, Lee,” she responded coldly: “yes, Varney. It's really idiotic of you,” she turned to him; “you are not a boy any more, you're not even a young man, and you can't take liberties with your digestion. You are quite like Helena with her prayers—if she feels very well she's apt to forget them, but if she's sick she says them as hard as possible. I wish she were like Gregory.”
“Gregory and you are cut out of the same gold cloth,” Lee Randon pronounced.
“That was lovely of you, Lee.” Fanny radiated happiness. “No one could say anything prettier to his old wife.” Dinner was over, and, rising, she walked around the table and laid a confident arm on his shoulders. The knife-like tenderness which, principally, he had for her overwhelmed him; and he held Fanny against him in a silent and straining embrace. For that reason he was annoyed at himself when, sitting through an uneventful evening, his simile of the pig, enormously fat, sleepily contented, in its pen, returned to him. It wasn't that he found an actual analogy between the pig and life, individuals, on a higher plane, so much as that he was vaguely disturbed by the impression that there was an ultimate similitude between him, Lee Randon, and a fattened somnolence of existence.
After all, were his individual opinions and doubts expressed in a manner forceful enough to diversify him from a porcine apathy? The pig, secure against the inequalities of fate and weather, wallowed through life with a dull fullness of food as regular as the solar course. Christopher was his wife. Now that, Lee told himself, with a vision of the gardener's moustache, sadly drooping and stained with tobacco, his pale doubtful gaze, was inexcusable. He abruptly directed his thoughts to Peyton and Claire Morris; how exact Claire had been in the expression of her personality! What, he grasped, was different in her from other women was precisely that; together with an astonishing lack of sentimental bias, it operated with the cutting realism of a surgeon's blade. She had, as well, courage.
That was the result of her heritage; and he wondered if all strong traits were the action of superior blood strayed into expected and unexpected places? It was probable, but not susceptible of proof. The pig's blood was that of the best registered Berkshire. God damn the pig!
He asked Fanny if she had heard any further particulars of the proposed rearrangement of the Morrises' lives; when they were to separate; but she knew no more than he. “I hope he doesn't come here,” she said vigorously: “I should refuse to speak to him or have him at my table. Outrageous! I can't make out why you take it so coolly. Mina Raff's a rotten immoral woman; it doesn't matter how it's arranged. Why,” she gasped, “she can be no more than Peyton's mistress, no better than the women on the street.”
“That is so,” he agreed. But his following question of the accepted badness of mistresses and streetwalkers he wisely kept to himself. Were they darker than the shadow cast by the inelastic institution of matrimony? At one time prostitutes were greatly honored; but that had passed, he was convinced, forever; and this, on the whole, he concluded, was fortunate; for, perhaps, if prostitution were thoroughly discredited, marriage might, in some Elysian future, be swept of most of its rubbish. Houses of prostitution, mistresses, like charity, absorbed and dissipated a great deal of the dissatisfaction inseparable from the present misconceptions of love and society. The first move, obviously, in stopping war was the suppression of such ameliorating forces as the Red Cross; and, conversely, with complete unions, infidelity would languish and disappear.