Lennan went slowly home, trying to gauge exactly how anyone who knew all would judge him.  It was a little difficult in this affair to keep a shred of dignity.

Sylvia had not gone up, and he saw her looking at him anxiously.  The one strange comfort in all this was that his feeling for her, at any rate, had not changed.  It seemed even to have deepened—­to be more real to him.

How could he help staying awake that night?  How could he help thinking, then?  And long time he lay, staring at the dark.

As if thinking were any good for fever in the veins!

X

Passion never plays the game.  It, at all events, is free from self-consciousness, and pride; from dignity, nerves, scruples, cant, moralities; from hypocrisies, and wisdom, and fears for pocket, and position in this world and the next.  Well did the old painters limn it as an arrow or a wind!  If it had not been as swift and darting, Earth must long ago have drifted through space untenanted—­to let. . . .

After that fevered night Lennan went to his studio at the usual hour and naturally did not do a stroke of work.  He was even obliged to send away his model.  The fellow had been his hairdresser, but, getting ill, and falling on dark days, one morning had come to the studio, to ask with manifest shame if his head were any good.  After having tested his capacity for standing still, and giving him some introductions, Lennan had noted him down:  “Five feet nine, good hair, lean face, something tortured and pathetic.  Give him a turn if possible.”  The turn had come, and the poor man was posing in a painful attitude, talking, whenever permitted, of the way things had treated him, and the delights of cutting hair.  This morning he took his departure with the simple pleasure of one fully paid for services not rendered.

And so, walking up and down, up and down, the sculptor waited for Nell’s knock.  What would happen now?  Thinking had made nothing clear.  Here was offered what every warm-blooded man whose Spring is past desires—­youth and beauty, and in that youth a renewal of his own; what all men save hypocrites and Englishmen would even admit that they desired.  And it was offered to one who had neither religious nor moral scruples, as they are commonly understood.  In theory he could accept.  In practice he did not as yet know what he could do.  One thing only he had discovered during the night’s reflections:  That those who scouted belief in the principle of Liberty made no greater mistake than to suppose that Liberty was dangerous because it made a man a libertine.  To those with any decency, the creed of Freedom was—­of all—­the most enchaining.  Easy enough to break chains imposed by others, fling his cap over the windmill, and cry for the moment at least:  I am unfettered, free!  Hard, indeed, to say the same to his own unfettered Self!  Yes, his own Self was in the judgment-seat; by his own verdict and decision he must abide.  And though he ached for the sight of her, and his will seemed paralyzed—­many times already he had thought:  It won’t do!  God help me!