Cytherea

arly in connection with Savina. His state of mind, his intentions, he realized, should be clear for the moment when he saw her. In general they were; but the particulars, the details of any probable

uosity of the situation before him. However, he was advancing at a speed, to a position, for which there was no warrant. None at all. Perh

his home, on account of Savina. This, he again insisted, would have happened independently of her; his life in Eastlake had broken up of its own accord; its elements had been too tenuous for the withstanding any longer of the str

he love Savina? Damned if he knew! He might reply to that, he thought ruefully, if he grasped what love was, what the blasted phrase meant. As it was, it seemed to Lee, a dictionary of synonyms would be helpless to make all its varied significances distinct. He

hed on, summoned, once. He had moved emotionally and not intellectually; he hadn't known, from hour to hour, in what direction he would proceed. Certainly nothing could be said in his defense on the score of common sense; that, though, didn't disturb him; at a time when he might have been said to rely on it, common sense had failed him utterly. He had thrown that over his shoulder. Nor w

there lose all consciousness of the trivial mundane world. That, Lee felt, given the rest, the fact that he was here as he was, was sufficient; but-again still-he had had no voice in it. The passion had inundated him in the ma

-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

o 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 n

moment when he had, so

gs to a solid comfortab

his sharp regret at t

comparatively unimport

stasteful efforts, impe

f responsibilities: wr

rticles, stories, books

had so miraculously e

ful body, so unexpect

g, was the difference b

e Randon thought with a

ssed by her, with the m

of the i

naturally, it had not

d in a supreme delight,

for the last. He was g

t. Here, suddenly, inte

epid and meaningless pe

he take advantage of i

the hotel valet hung

es into which he inten

s; laid out were a hea

t these various careful

on. His pearl pin Fanny

ted personally by a cel

hing more. He lighted a

coat and stick, and desc

nrestrained

t it had such a look. He was positively jovial. He dismissed the cab before the familiar entrance on East Sixty-sixth Street, and was admitted immediately: the servant caught his coat, and he went into the drawing-room. There had been, he saw, a tea; the confusion ling

as wearing a cloth dress of dull red-hadn't he heard it called Cuba color?-with a heavy girdle of grotesque intert

ended, "that is what has occurred. We are not to blame ourselves too much, as I've explained; the thing happened within itself, died of its own accord. But t

that for me to de

own yet. I don't, candidly, now, expect to be. You ought to come to this through your head, and not the heart, which I'd naturally prefer you to use. What, in fact, I am asking you is to go away with me, to live with me. I shall not, and you couldn't, very well, return.

myself now; I should say fifteen thousand dollars a year. Fanny, very rightfully-for herself and the children-will get most of what I h

she br

llow. He was intelligent, unprejudiced and calm and, Lee added, remote from the values, the ponderous authority, of a northern hypocritical society. Then he forgot that in the realization that Savina was going away with him, that she was to be

hall we

ncome tax receipt, and we can manage all that best there. Then Key West, Havana, anywhere. We wil

dress for dinner, this will do very nicely for the train; and come as soon after as I can pack a bag. There will be literally nothing i

you proves that. Why, under the circumstances, should you, anyone, stay? I don't feel a particle immoral, or even devilish. It's all so sensible and balanced and superior. No, no,

ence with the porter-a basket of fruit from the restaurant, and, if procurable regularly or irregularly, a drawing-room on the Washington train. Then he went

was standing, as he had arranged with Savina, with his bag before the hotel; and, just past the hour, the cab which held her turned in to the sidewalk. She had two bags, but one was very small-her toilet things, she explained-and she was carryin

ing was as usual when he left, but when he gets back it will be changed. I'm sorry t

hand for superficial relationships and conventions. He had spoken lightly but, watching her, he saw the grimness of her passion strike the

d were conscious of the swimming lights of the Jersey plain, the confused illuminated darkness of cities, the tranquility of open country, the ringing echo of bridges and the sustained wail of their locomotive. They were, again, re

opposed to idleness, of idleness contrasted with sleep. The promise of satiation, of inevitability, steeped his being in a pleasant lethargy. It was the same to him if they moved or stopped, whether they arrived at the next destination or remained forever in a sandy monotony of tomato fields or b

ick; but he might have gathered that, she pointed out, by her willingness to undertake Cuba. Admitting that he had missed this feminine subtlety, he arranged two deck chairs in an advantageous angle, and they sat enveloped in a mildness which, heavy with the odor of water-soaked wood, was untroubled by any wind. When the steamer left its pier Savina put a hand inside one of his. The harbor lights dropped, pair by pair, back into the night;

e. They might have the chamber until Tuesday, Lee was told, in an English inflected with the tonal gravity of Spain. It was hardly past eight in the morning, an awkward hour to arrive newly at a city, he thought, as they were carried up in the elevator. The details of the f

ed out on the balcony; directly below and across a narrow paved street was a floridly impressive building obviously for the purpose of varied assemblages, and on his left a park was laid in concrete walks, royal palms on towering smooth dull trunks, unfamiliar trees with a grac

illed with delight; a positive color glowed in place of the customary uniform pallor of her cheeks; she opened her bags with an irresistible youthful energy. "Think what we have been missing," she called above the sound of the water running into the tub; "and

to 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 con

e 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

nore the thought of your wife and children; they'll get along just as well, maybe better, witho

re 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 th

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, th

to sit and smoke, and then-smoke and sit. I am done with the proper and expected thing in every one of its forms. I have always hated churches; and the spots where soldiers fell or martyrs were bu

comb right away, now; and-I warn you-if it's only in our room I'm going to wear them. If I could get you into

re to, we'll drive along the sea, one way and then the other, and have dinner where we happen to be. I hope you w

he observed; "you have some, of course, but

ed that I couldn't accept, nor allow you to use, your own money. I don't exactly have to ask you for a taxi-cab fare,

d him. "William gave them t

s afraid they had been a legacy from your mother. I much prefer the

sonal admiration for Savina grew with the understanding of her exceptionally perceptive being. She was what, above all else, he would have chosen for a companion: her extraordinary feeling was sheathed, tempered, in the satin of a faultless aesthetic sense; the delicacy of her body was resembled by the fineness of her feminine mind; she was e

nt to a restaurant like a pavilion on a roof, their table, by a low masonry wall, overlooking the harbor entrance. The heat of the day, cloaked in night, was cooled by the trade wind moving softly across the sea; the water of the harbor was black, like jet shining with the reflections of the lights strung along the shore; the lighthouse at Morr

the port-holes, and a drift of music reached him. "Some day soon," she went on, "we'll take a boat like that, and go-where? It doesn't matter: to a far strange land. Hills scented with tea flowers. Streets with lacquered houses. Villages with silver bells hung along the eaves. Valleys of primroses under mountains of ice. We'll see them all from little windows, and the

ained at the bottoms of the glasses. In the night-their beds were separated by the width of the balcony doors-she called for him, acute with fright. "What is it?"

without pause, without variation, with an insistence which became cruel, and then unbearable, it went on. Lee Randon, after an uneasiness which culminated in an exasperated wrath, found a degree of exactness in his description: it was, undoubtedly, the jungle, Africa, debased into a peculiarly harrowing travesty of later civilized emotions. Finally he lost the impression of

ender hand, the nails stained with vermilion, to the pointed oval of her face against the black hair and streaming gold of the headdress. Nothing, it appeared, could be farther apart than the muffled furious strains escaping in bursts through the opened windows beyond and the still apparition from the tranquility of

ess of her irregular breathing. As a grey light diluted the darkness, the trade wind, the night wind, dropped, and the heat palpably increased. Instantaneously the sun-flooded morning was born, a morning that lost its freshness, its pearly iridescence, immediately. He closed the slats of the balcony doors: Savina at last was sleeping, with her countenance, utterly spent, turned to him. The sharp cries of the newsboys, the street vendors, were drowned in the full s

to tell you: something black and dreadful ... had me. There was no one else. It was like a woods. The hands ripping at me-" With her face b

nderstand, entirely respectable-had been held in the Opera House. "But there won't be another until after we leave," Lee reassured Savina; "they are rather rare except at carnival."

e; the water became the air, the air water, with a transition as gradual as the edge of dusk. The tropical evening was accomplished rapidly, as dramatically as the uprush of the sun: they were gazing into the distance over a ti

ing her air of a constant reserve, she looked younger, daring. Her sharp grace, exposed in the films of summer dress, had an aspect of belonging, rather than to the character she had deserted, to a woman at once conscious of its effect and not unwilling to have it measured by the appraising gaze of the masculine

been an impossibility; she was the center, the motive, of the design of his emotions; but it was surprising how contented he was strolling in the outskirts, in the minor parks and glorietas and paseos, of the world of his passionate adventure. He sat placidly in the Cortina de Valdez, looking across the narrow water to

ere that similitude was concerned, he was aware of a disconcerting, almost humiliating, shifting of balance. At first, recognizing aspects of Cytherea in Savina, now in Cytherea he merely found certain qualities of the woman. The doll, it seemed, had not been absorbed in Savina; the distant inanimate object was more real than the actual straining arms about his neck, the insatia

on, he yet had time to linger over and enjoy the occurrences by the way. He liked each day for itself, and she regarded it only as an insignificant detail of their unity. All her planning, her dress and ardor and moods, were dire

and a great many at once, women had grown aware of the appalling difference between what they might demand and what they had been receiving. In consequence of this the world of masculine complacency was being dealt some rude blows. But Lee Randon couldn't hope to go into this; the problem was sufficiently complicated from his side of the fence. Ther

ether, they were, her conduct had been admirable. A remarkably attractive and faithful woman, he told himself; it was a pity that, in her estimation, her go

ay evening now, and they would have to give up their room at the Inglaterra Tuesday. Obviously there wasn't time to write Daniel and have a reply by

ed linguistic confidence whatever Lee wrote, and there was a small assemblage of Americans at the counter of a steamship company across the office. What, it began to appear, they'd have to do would be to take the train for Cobra on Tuesday. Yet they couldn't quite come down on Daniel so unexpectedly; he lived, Lee recalled, on a batey, the central dominating point of a sugar estate; and-unmarried-w

Daniel would see at once that this wasn't the usual flight south of an indulgence headed for paresis. Savina, his entire affair, demanded a dignified reception. They were seated in the patio of the hotel, by a pool and the

ld have us held on a very unpleasant-sounding charge. I know you detest conventions, but I must say I am glad other people live by them; it makes it so comfortable for us. Imagine,

o reason for you to be insulting, w

na replied; "when it was I all

ne about us," he protested cheerfully. She g

s on Sol and Gloria Streets! And, just as you meant, if they knew who, what, we were, they'd want to have us arrested. You see, I am infringing o

o assault the double standard. Consider it done. You are right. Everyone with sense is right there. But if I hear it again I'll th

proper and have too many scruples. You'll have to stay

," he ec

t it

tter could

d the pitcher.

ed him; the strained intensity of her face, the sh

y slept badly; and the morning showed them a wide plain scattered with royal palms which thickened in the distance. Such vast groves, Lee thought, robbed them of the stateliness so impressive in parks and cities. The landscape, tangled with lianas or open about massive and isolated ceiba trees, was without the luxuriance of color he had expected. It was evident that there had been no rain for a long period; and the crowded growths, grey rather than green, were monotonous, oppressive. Other than Apollinaris and the conventional black

k men in broad straw hats and coat-like shirts rode meagre horses with the sheaths of long formidable blades slapping their miserable hides. Groups of fantastically saddled horses drooped their heads tied in the vicinity of a hands-breadth of shade by general stores. "I could burst into

uildings that faced them from either side of the tracks, had-in addition to a supreme ugliness-an indefinably threatening air. The rawness, the machetes hanging about the booted heels of soiled idlers, the presence everywhere of negroes with an unrestrained curiosity in Lee and his companion, filled him

continued decidedly; "I'll

ncapable of understanding English, managed to grasp the fact that Lee wished to see Daniel Randon immediately. The proprietor assented, and urged them up a stair. "I won't have you wait out here," Lee told Savina; "it will be only for an hour or so." The room into

d on the upper porch and a prospect of the tracks beyond. "If I stayed here a night I'd be raving," Savina declared. "Lee, such a color! And the place, the people-did you notice that carriageful of black women that went by us along the street? There were only thre

e cane." Savina asked what they would do if he were away. He might be in Santiago. The company had other estates. "Not now," Lee decided; "what they call the grinding season has just begun, and every hour

first," Lee suggested diplom

impassive face and considering brown eyes. "This," he said unremarkably, "is a surprise

ay. "I am sorry to tell you that she is at home. But I'm here, and not by myself." A slight expression of annoyance twitched at

ndable," was all that the other

h me; but she is that only until the divor

was accompanied by a faint l

ious, final. Really, we came to Cuba on your account, to see you. When I tried to compose a telegram from Havana, telling you something of the

aniel was making, Lee realized, what for him was a tremendous conversational effort. "Even if I were alone, except for Cubans, it would be possible; but there is Mr. Stribling, with his wife and, at present, grown daughter, from Utica; he is the Assistant Administrador. Then we have George Vincent and Katharine-the Chief Engineer with a very new bride from, I believe, Ohio. They are very particular in Ohio. And others. You must r

s. "All that I can suggest," Daniel went on, "is that you return to Havana tomorrow evening; the company has offices there, and it will be easier fo

re tomorrow. "And, in the meanwhile," Lee inquire

His apologies to Savina, in the room above, were faultless. There was, simply, at the Cobra sugar estancia, no satisfactory arrangement for guests; except for an occasional par

rs of white heat fell in a ladder-like order across a blue wall; the segments of sunlight were as sharp and solid as incandescent metal. In the cobalt shadow Savina was robbed of her vitality; she seemed unreal; as she passed through the vivid projected rays of midday it appeared a

here were miles of it packed around him like grey cotton. To the left of the hotel, the bare plaza, half hidden in scrubby bushes, there was an extended shed with a number of doors and fragments of fence, heaped rusted tins and uncovered garbage; and, lounging in the openings, the door-frames often

audily painted boards and galvanized sheet iron. They were all completely open at the front, with their remarkable contents, pandemoniums of merchandise, exposed upon a precarious sidewalk of uneven parallel boards elevated two or three feet above the road. Mostly cafés, restaurants, there was still an incredible number of banks-mere shells with flat tarred roofs and high counters

es, from seas, of liquid bright muds in which grotesque caricatures of men, barbarously clad or, swollen headed, in travesties of civilized garb, faced women with exaggerated and obscene anatomies. They, like the banks, were crowded; companies of negroes sat over dishes of mucous consistency

by shameless feminine cries; lust and rage and nameless intoxications quivered like the perceptible films of hot dust on the air. Negroes, Haitians with the flattened skulls, the oily skin, of the Gold Coast, and Jamaicans glowi

r of death on wire strings, at the exasperated sensibilities of organisms exposed, without preparation, to an incomprehensible state of life a million years beyond their grasp. It fascinated and disturbed Lee: it had a definite interest, a meaning, for him. Was it to this that Savina had turned? Had the world only in the adherence to the dut

single reeking street of Cobra. Again, the scene around him wasn't hypocritical, its intention was as thickly evident as the rice powder on the black sweating faces of the prostitutes. Hypocrisy was peculiarly the vice of civilization. His necessity was an escape from either fate-the defilement of a pandering t

eligions and states and sacrifice and slaughter He had a feeling that the accomplishment was ludicrously out of proportion to all that had gone into it. For the only thing of value, the security of a little knowledge, was still denied him. What, so tragically long ago, Africa begged from the mystery of night, from idols painted indifferently with ochre or blood, he was demanding from a power which had lost even the advantage of visibility. His superiority was negligible. It was confined relatively to unimportant things-such as an abstract conception of a universe part

ful silken knees, a floating unsubstantial wrap like crushed handfuls of lilacs. "This room kills anything I might put on," she replied to the expression of his pleasure. "After all, we shall soon be gone. I got Daniel's servant to telegraph the Inglaterra we were coming back. They'll have to watch out for us. After we see your brother there, and make a beginning of our rearrangements, we will go on, I think. Do you mind? South, Guadeloupe, perhaps, because it's so difficult to get to, and then Br

frightens me dreadfully, and then I remember: it isn't William and the house on Sixty-sixth Street, but you, Lee, and Cuba. We're together with nothing in the world to spoil our joy. And, when we are old, we shall sit side by side at Etretat, I am sure, and watch

m of the room shuttered against the white day, with her wrap, the color of lilacs, lightly clasping her shoulders, she seemed to be a vision in subdued paint. Lee was held motionless, outside, by the fervor of an appeal to fate rather than to him. She was, the thoug

a café at Havana. She had none of the constrained modesty, the sense of discomfort at her own person, so dominating in Fanny. Lee finally lighted a lamp: the hours, until the precipitant onrush of night, seemed stationary; gigantic moths fluttered audibly about the illumination and along the dim ceiling. When, later, he was on the bed, it was wet under his sweating body. In a passing sleep Savina gave one of th

ces; all as unreal, as withdrawn, as a simulated murder on a distant stage. He pictured the flaring restaurants, the banks with corrugated iron locked across their fronts; the faces of the negroes brought black and lurid out of the surrounding blackn

brother's ability, it might be, to grip an industry by the throat. He envied, speculated about, the younger man's calmness, the Chinese quality of his silence, the revelations of his carefully few words. Daniel, in past years, had been often drunk, various women had been seriously or lightly associated with his name; but he appeared to have cast

; he was certain that the other would have said something valuable about her. Through his long contact with the naked tropics Daniel understood many things hidden from him. He must know, for instance, about the Brujeria, the negro magic brought through Haiti

the plaza below came a low sibilant conversation. It went on and on, until Lee, in an irrepressible indignation,

, it w

ugh I must stay here forever, that if I tried to get away I'd be forced back. And I dreamed that everything I owned had been turned blue-my nightgowns and nail files and travelling clock and the oranges. You w

it be?" he as

? Or perhaps I'm blind." Her voice was plainly terrified. "Light a match, please. Oh, thank you. What an idiot I am. Hold

ved, with a note of brutality. "They will find

was the muffled clatter of horses' hoofs in the dust outside; a locomotive whistled in a far universal key. Savina slowly became visible; asleep, her personality, her vividness, were gone; she was as featureless, as pallid,

ilm across the floor. Savina put as much as possible, so early, into her bags. Standing before a narrow mirror nailed to a wall, with her comb, she turned. "My hair is soaked," she wailed; "just putting my arms up is more than I can manage. Haven't you been thinking about all the cold things in the w

le, but the process simply must go on in private. I don't want to be a wife, Lee-one of those creatures in a dressing sacque with hair pins in her mouth. I can't bear the thought of you and a flannel petticoat together. That is wher

ing it over her face; he had never before, he realized, seen a woman faint. It was terrifying but not grave; they did it, he had heard, very often. No wonder, after such a night. She had been gone over a minute now; there must be someone in the place who would know what to do. He put

ina murmured. She made an effort to raise herself up from the pillow, but he restrained her; Lee commanded her to be absolutely still. "The spirits of ammonia is in the dressing-case," she whispered. He held the clouding aromatic liquid to her

ness, gently holding her supine hand. She mustn't worry, he

" she insisted. "As soon as we get away from

o good in your stirring before you have to. If Daniel comes, you can see hi

ble. Suddenly he didn't like it; abruptly an apprehension, from which he was obliged to bar a breath of panic, possessed him. Lee covered her lightly with a sheet, and went out, softly closing the door. Before the hotel he caught the proprietor by a shoulder and pointed up to his room. "Sick, sick," he rep

weaker-a thing he would have declared impossible-than before. He bathed her face and throat in water, and there was a murmur of gratitude, of love, so low that, with his ear against her lips, the individual words were

d Lee. The latter said sharply, "She has fainted, but it's only the heat. She'll be all right after a rest." As he spoke, more to him

r into Camagüey for Fancett. It will take three hours or worse." He left promptly, closing the door soundlessly; and Lee h

e barred sunlight cut like white knives at the opposite wall; a pungent odor of cooking peppers came in under the door. Savina's bags, nearly packed, stood open on chairs; the linen suit in which she travelled, the small hat and swathing brow

his attentiveness to Savina, his crowding thoughts, he listened for the return of the car with the doctor. What was his name? Foster, Faucett-no, it was Fancett. An American, evidently. "The doctor is coming," he told Savina gently. "Daniel felt that he had better see you. From Camagüey. A good man. I want to ge

d. A dreadful twenty-four, thirty, hours; how brutally hard it had been on her. She hadn't complained; he had been more upset, impatient, than Savina. What a splendid companion! But that

d: it was his brother and an elderly wasted man with a vermilion sprig of geranium in the lapel of a white coat. He nodded to Lee, pressed his hand, and went quickly to the bed. In the stillness while Dr. Fancett took Savin

eart," he pronounced. The significance of h

xcessive," he added concisely. "Excesses." The single word followed after a hesitation in which Fancett was plainly at a loss. His frowning gaze was still bent upon Lee. "I know so little of Mrs. Randon's history," he finally said. Daniel naturally had inferred, or perhaps the doctor ded

ing on. I will see that she is as comfortable here

had two husbands; each with the right, if he desired, to be at a side of her bed, each holding one of her limp hands. He dismissed the elaborated thought in a rage at the triviality of his mind. Fancett and Daniel had

by that? It was the fault of Daniel, the immobile, as much as anyone. In an airy room, under comfortable conditions, probably it wouldn't have happened. Sa

ing ... with you.

sion-the blueness of the room, of the walls, seemed to settle on her countenance. It increased, her face was in tone with the color that had so disturbed her, a vitreo

live blue

t with dread, he saw that h

ity and condemnation. He regretted this, because of Savina, dead. Alive she would have smiled her contempt; but death was different. Anyone would acknowledge that. The dead should be protected from slurs and scandal and obscene comments.

th a sheet. That would follow soon enough. The blueness was receding, leaving her pinched, but white. She had always been pale.... By God, he had forgotten to tell them. Lee, stumbling down the sta

is

hind a soiled thin hand, he coughed. It was clear that he wished intensely to escape, but was held by his conceptions of the obligations of conduct. "The suddenness-" Lee said, and then paused with a furrowed brow; "that's what surprises me. She was as well as you, and singing, yes-singing, that she didn't want to be a wife. I thought she had tri

"There is nothing for you to do here, and you may as well come to the batey with me. There are some accidents tha

l assured him, had not been neglected. Her effects were to go over in the wagon with them. Lee, jolting on a springless contrivance over an informal road, kept his hand on the bags beside him. They w

azing with lights and with music on the upper deck, had swept out of the harbor. And, since then, at night, she had cried out. That, he had thought, was the expression of her consuming passion. He hadn't kil

ed if, in the hurried packing, her handkerchief had been neglected? It was one of a number that Savina had bought in Havana. He had stayed outside, in the motor, smoking; and, when she had rejoined him, after a long wait, she had displayed he

rning spirit. What, without knowing it, Dr. Fancett had meant-a thing Lee himself had foreseen-was that Savina had killed herself, she had been consumed by her own flame. But she hadn't regretted it. That assurance, bequeathed to him in the very hush of death, was of massive importance. Nothing else mattered-she had been happy with

eprivation stabbed at him. Why, she was gone; Savina was dead. Her arms would never again go around his neck. The marks of the mules across her na

to find words there. "The conventions, for example, stronger in William Grove than his feelings, saved the reputation of his wife; they kept Fanny alive and, with her heroic and instinctive pride, made it possible for you to go back to Eastlake. If you choose, of course. I can't enter into that. But, if you decide to return, you won't be supported by noble memories of yo

horizon obliterated in smoke, a stationary cloud-like opacity only thinning where the buildings began: the objects in the foreground were sharp; but, as the distance increased, they were blurred as though seen through a swimming of the vision. The great bulk of the sugar mill, at the left, like-on the flatness of the land-a rectangular mountain shaken by a constant rumbling, was indistinct below, but the mirado

rushers. The heavy air was charged with the smooth oiled tumult of machinery, the blast whistles of varied signals, and the harshness of escaping steam. Other houses, smaller than Daniel's but for the rest resembling it, were strung along the open-the dwellings

the out-lying colonias of the La Quinta estate, that had destroyed three caballerias of ratoon; the sheer tyranny of an intricate process which, for seven months in the year, was not allowed to pause, had kept Lee from any satisfactory

honest; but, again as you pointed out, its effect around us, for bad or very possibly good, was brought to nothing by the way it was drawn back into the victorious conspiring of sham. Even I don't know which, commendable or fatal, it was; I haven't been able to find out; I hadn't time. But Savina preferred the two weeks we had together t

about

ely contented,

ale word for an

el Randon was persistently non-committal. He had no intention, he said, of urging Lee to any speech he might later regret and wish unpronounced. "It's about my attitude toward Savina," Lee proceeded; "or it may be about a doll; I don't know. No, Savina and the doll weren't as distinct as you

than any living woman; and her charm, what she seemed to hint at, to promise, filled me with the need to find it and have it for my own. That desire grew until it was stronger t

gy and time in holding it up, supporting it, assuring myself that it was necessary. The most I would acknowledge, even privately, was that, like the majority of men, I hated work. Like so many men I was certain that my home, my wife, were absorbing as possible. Wherever I looked,

er. It was enough just to be coming home to the house where she was waiting. I tell you, Daniel, my life then was transfigured. How long did it last-four years, six, eight? I can't be exact; but if I speak of its duration you will guess that it went. It went slowly, so slowly that for

loak of hypocrisy. Then she had the impracticable conviction that I existed solely in her, that she was a prism through which every feeling and thought I had must be deflected. Fanny didn't express this openly, it had too silly a sound, but underneath, savagely, she fought and schemed and lied-more conventions-for it. And, when the children were born, she was ready for them with such a mountain of pr

and Ohio, went by in light afternoon dresses, one propelling a baby in a cart. The Field Superintendent, lank and sun-dark under a green

She was a doll, but it is more useful, now, to picture her as a principle. I didn't realize that at first: I took he

een so blind, so fatuous, Daniel. I actually thought that there was a choice, a special graciousness, existing and reserved for me." He laughed, not bitterly, but in a wonderment that bordered on dismay. "I felt that I had found it in Savina. I did get a lot there-more than I should have hoped for-but not precisely that. At last I

nthropomo

differently, naturally, in the healthy fertility of animals and simple lives; but the conceit of men, men like me, had opposed and antagonized it. Magnifying our sensibilities, we had come to demand the dignity of separate imm

privilege of escaping from slavery into impotence, the doubtful privilege of repaying the indignities of our birth." His rigid strained face was drenched with sweat. "We made her out of our longing and discontent

more dangerous. She, too, had been constrained by the artificial, by conventionality; and when the moment of reality came it broke William Grove, Fanny, Helena and Gregory-all th

told him. "Do you notice that t

d underneath. It's a good thing for our comfort that there's so much of it we can't see the fires. If the books of physics ar

Oriente," Dani

ual like me, it is worse than useless, fatal. It destroys the support of a common cause with a humanity only less resentful than sentimental. And this has brought me to

u may as well be in Eastlake as at

matter where he changed to. I still think that most of it is inexcusable, perhaps hopeless, but I can't subscribe to it. What Fanny wants is contrition and the return to a time forever lost. I shouldn't be able to persuade he

ntently into the hidden east. "You are right," he said, crediting L

of words-I don't need them. I believe, in nature, that the length of paternity is measured by the

s brevity was explicit: "what in

iting; but I have given it up because it would involve me in so much that is disagreeable. The amazing fact is that, since I have acquired a degree of wisdom, there is nothing for me to do, nowhere to go. The truth, I have always heard, will make

a news sheet in the interest of my other interests-" he could think of no term sufficiently descriptive of his remoteness from all that. "I shall have to be what a universal Eastlake will prefer to call me. I'd stay here, at La Quinta, if you could find something for me to do-like picking the limes fresh for the Daiquiri cocktails. Do you

house coat, appeared with a tray on which two g

l; or, better yet, put half a grain of a drug that will occur to you on my tongue and close my mouth on further indiscretions? That has its aspects. But not so strongly after one of Juan's drinks; they are distilled illusions, vain dreams still of hope. They have all the brave ring of accomplis

andon wa