iness he had
proclaimed. His doubts, his questioning, were resolved into the
conviction that the act of the dancer was her spirit made visible,
created tangibly for a tangible purpose, and that, there, she was
indestructible.

With that conclusion to serve as a stay and a belief, a philosophy of
conduct, he returned from the extra-mundane to the world. Charles
thought of La Clavel's desire to dance in Buenos Aires, for South
America. He wondered how old she was; he had never before considered
her in any connection with age; she had seemed neither old nor young,
but as invested with the timeless quality of her art. She had spoken
often of her girlhood, but no picture of her as a girl had formed in
his mind. It was conceivable that, in more stable circumstances, she
would have grown old, become withered with the peculiar ugliness of
aged Spanish women; but that, too, he could not realize. Somehow, La
Clavel's being was her dancing, and what had gone before, or what
might have followed, were irrelevant, unreal; they were not she. He
understood, now, her protest against being absorbed, involved, in
anything but her profession.

He became conscious of the sustained gravity of his thoughts, how his
activity had been forced from the body to his mind; and that recalled
to him the necessity for a contrary appearance. It would be wise for
him to go to the Cafe Dominica that evening, in an obvious facile
excitement at his connection, at once close and remote, with the death
of Santacilla in the dancer's room. But, beyond the fact that it was
known he had dispatched the servant upstairs, and the usual wild,
thin speculations, nothing had been allowed to appear. Santacilla, it
was announced, had died naturally. La Clavel wasn't mentioned. She had
spoken to others than Charles of her determination to go to the
Argentine; and it was probable, rumor said, principally in Spanish
mouths, that she would go quietly south. At the United States Club,
the idlers and gamblers surveyed Charles with dubious looks; and, over
a rum punch, he adopted a sullen uncommunicative air. It would not do
to drop his widely advertised habits too suddenly; he could not, in a
day, change from a rake to a serious student of such books as
Machiavelli's Prince; and he prepared, with utter disgust, for his
final bow in the cloak of dissipation.

* * * * *

Purely by accident he met, at the Plaza de Toros, Jaime Quintara,
Remigi