, at the heart of this, stood enveloped, surrounded, by a drama
like the sharp clash of cymbals. It was easy to be overwhelmed,
strangled, blinded, by the savage color; briefly to be obliterated.
That possibility had been, lately, very much in his mind; and he
wondered, against all his recent change, if, in the surrender of his
idealism, he had lost his amulet, his safety. While he had, to a large
extent, solved, for himself, the philosophy of conduct, cleared the
motives of his acts, a great deal was inexplicable still. He saw,
dimly, that there could be little hope of justice on any island except
as the projection, the replica, of a fundamental universal integrity
of justice. Perfection like that couldn't begin on the rim of being
and extend inward; it must be at the center of all life, obscured,
delayed, but, in an end not computable in the span of human existence,
certain and inevitable. Charles Abbott now had the feeling that,
parallel with the maintaining of his grasp on materialism, his
recognition of the means at his hand, there should be an allegiance to
a supremacy of the immeasurable whole.

That double vision, the acceptance of a general good together with the
possibility of extreme ill to the individual, puzzled him. He was
required to put faith in a power seemingly indifferent to him, to
discharge a responsibility in return for which nothing that he could
weigh was promised. Charles recalled what had overtaken the dancer, La
Clavel, in payment for a heroic effort against an insupportable
oppression. Disaster had met the body, the flesh; what occurred in
the spirit he was unable to grasp; but this, suddenly, breathlessly,
he saw:

La Clavel's bitter defiance, her mountain-born hatred of oppression,
her beaten but undefiled body, had communicated to him something of
her own valor. It was as though she had given him a palm, a shielded
flame, to add to his own fortitude. In all probability she would,
soon, be dead; Charles correctly gauged the Spanish animosity; and yet
she was alive, strong, in him. She would be living; it was Ceaza y
Santacilla who had died, been vanquished; his abnormal refinement
dropping so easily into the bestial, the measure of evil, in him, for
which he stood, had been slain, dissipated, ended. The shawl
contracted, became a thing magnificent but silk, a manton invested
with a significance brave and surprisingly tender. It was, now, the
standard of La Clavel, the mantle of the saintl