ride, upright, the crest of a thunderous wave. He
hated, now, every phase of a decent suburban smugness. Someone else
was welcome to the girl designated, by his mother, to be his wife.
Someone other than himself might sit across the dinner-table from her,
week after week, month after month, year after year, and watch her
stereotyped face beyond the cut flowers; another might listen to the
interminable gabble about servants and neighbors and dresses and
cards. The children would be differently, more appropriately,
fathered; his, Charles Abbott's, potential children were gathered into
an ideal that was, too, an idea. It must be served, realized, within
the dimensions of his own bone and fibre; it was exclusively his, his
the danger, the penalty and the reward. Charles would not have had it
different, even if, although none existed, he had any choice.

He must, however, prepare himself against the betrayal he was able
to trace so clearly in others; there could be no faltering, no
remorse; he was cut off from the ordinary solaces, the comfortable
compactness, of general living. But, already, temperamentally, he
liked, preferred, this; alone, never for a minute was he lonely.
The inattention to home, primarily the result of a new scene and of
exciting circumstances, had grown into an impersonal fondness for
his family; he failed to miss them, to wish for their presence. The
only element that remained from the past was his love for Andres
Escobar; he confronted it valorously, deposed it from his mind, but
it clung around his heart. How fortunate it was that Andres could
not detach him from his resolve; it was unthinkable that one should
stand in the way of the other.

These reflections occupied his mind at various times and places: one
day in the American Consulate on Obispo Street; again at the steamship
office on Mercaderes; over his cigarette and cheese and jelly at the
Noble Havana; strolling along Ricla Street where the principal shops
were congregated; at a dinner party in the Palace of the Conde de
Santovernia. He was aloof. All the activity that absorbed the people
among whom he went was to him trivial, utterly of no consequence.
Sometimes he would walk through the stalls of the Mercado de Cristina,
on the Plaza Vieja, or in through the Honradez factory on Sol Street,
where a handful of cigars was courteously given to any appreciative
visitor. He would return along the Paseo de Valdez to the park where
he had sat wh