l, principally in the Cafe Dominica, a
superficial familiarity with other Americans in Havana for
banking or commercial purposes. They, regarding him as immensely
rich and dissipated, were half contemptuous and half eager for the
associations, the pleasures, of his mode of life. He went, as often
as it seemed necessary, to the United States Club on Virtudes Street,
where, together with his patriots, but different from them in a hidden
contempt, he gambled, moderately and successfully. His luck became
proverbial, and, coupled with La Clavel's name, his reputation soon
grew into what he intrigued for. Often, alone on the hotel roof,
he regarded himself with an objective amazement: everything was
precisely as he had planned, hoped for, on the steamer Morro
Castle--and entirely different.

It was probable that the death he had not, in imagination, shrunk
from, would crush him at any unexpected moment, an unpredictable slip;
but how could he have foreseen the trivial guise he would wear?
Charles was forced, it seemed to him, to ape every single quality he
hated. The spending of his money, as legitimately as though it were
exchanged for guns, on casual acquaintances and rum punches, on
gardenias that wilted and entertainment that choked him by its vulgar
banality, gradually embittered him. The insincerity of the
compliments he paid, the lying compliments to which he listened with
an ingenuous smile and an entire comprehension of their worthlessness,
steadily robbed his ideal of its radiant aloofness.

His enthusiasm, he discovered, his high ardor, must be changed to
patience and fortitude, the qualities which belonged to his
temperament and years had to give place to those of an accomplished
maturity; the romance of his circumstance deserted the surface to
linger hidden, cherished, beneath all the practical and immediate
rest. He began to perceive the inescapable disappointing difference
between an idea, a conception of the mind, and its execution. The
realization of that, he told himself, the seduction of the lofty, the
aerial, to earth, constituted success, power. The spirit and the
flesh! And the flesh constantly betrayed the highest determinations.
How he resented, distrusted, the mechanics, the traps and illusions,
of an existence on an animal plane!

His fervor, turned in upon itself, began to assume an aspect of the
religious; his imposed revolt from the mundane world turned his
thoughts to an intangible heaven, a