* * * * *

They greeted him vociferously: before he could turn on the light they were partly out of the covers, and the old argument about whose bed he should sit on in full progress. Helena's was by the door, so, returning her to the warmth of her blankets, he stopped beside her. The room, with the windows fully open, was cold, but he welcomed the white frozen purity of its barrenness. More than ever he was impressed by the remoteness of the children's bed-room from the passionate disturbances of living; but they, in the sense Fanny and he knew, weren't alive yet. They imitated the accents and concerns, caught at the gestures, of maturity; but, even in the grip of beginning instincts, they were hardly more sentient than the figures of a puppet show. Or, perhaps, their world was so far from his that they couldn't be said to span from one to the other. Gregory, in mind, was no more like him than a slip was like a tree bearing fruit—no matter how bitter. Helena more nearly resembled her mother; that had never occurred to him before.

It was undoubtedly true—her posturing recalled the feminine attitude in extreme miniature. In that he felt outside her sympathy, she belonged with her mother; to Gregory he was far more nearly allied. Gregory, anyhow, had the potentialities of his own dilemma; he might, in years to come, be drawn out of a present reality by the enigma, the fascination, of Cytherea. Lee Randon hoped not; he wanted to advise him, at once, resolutely to close his eyes to all visions beyond the horizon of wise practicability. Marry, have children, be faithful, die, he said; but, alas, to himself. Gregory, smiling in eager anticipation of what might ensue, was necessarily ignorant of so much. Something again lay back of that, Lee realized—his occupation in life. There he, Lee, had made his first, perhaps most serious, mistake. While the majority of men turned, indifferent, from their labor, there were a rare few—hadn't he phrased this before?—lost in an edifice of the mind, scientific or aesthetic or commercial, who were happily unconscious of the lapsing fretful years.

That was the way to cheat the sardonic gathered fates: to be deaf and blind to whatever, falsely, they seemed to offer; to get into bed heavy with weariness and rise hurried and absorbed. Over men so preoccupied, spent, Cytherea had no power. It was strange how her name had become linked with all his deepest speculations; she was involved in concerns remote from her apparent sphere and influence.

"Gracious, you're thinking a lot," Helena said.

"What are you thinking about?" Gregory added.

"A doll," he replied, turning to his daughter.

"For me," she declared.

"No, me," Gregory insisted.

Lee Randon shook his head. "Not you, in the least."

"Of course not," Helena supported him. "I should think it would make you sick, father, hearing Gregory talk like that. It does me. Why doesn't he ask for something that boys play with?"

"I don't want them, that's why," Gregory specified. "Perhaps I'd like to have a typewriter."

"You're not very modest." It was Helena again.

"It's father, isn't it? It isn't you."

"Listen," Lee broke in, "I came up here to be with two good children; but where are they?"

"I'm one." Helena, freeing herself definitely, closed her arms in a sweet warmth about his neck. "I'm one, too," Gregory called urgently. "No," his father pressed him back; "you must stay in bed. They are both here, I can see."

He wondered if, everything else forgotten, his children could constitute a sufficient engagement; but the sentimental picture, cast across his thoughts, of himself being led by a child holding each of his hands defeated it. He was turned in another direction.

Yet, tonight, they were remarkably engaging.... He had lost a great deal. For what? He couldn't—as usual—answer; but the memory of Savina, stronger than Fanny, metaphorically took Helena's arms away from his neck and blurred the image of Gregory. "Have you said your prayer?" he asked absent-mindedly making conversation. Oh, yes, he was informed, they did that with Martha. "I'll say mine again," Gregory volunteered. Again—a picture of a child, in a halo of innocence, praying at a paternal knee to a fresco of saccharine angels!

"Once is enough," he answered hurriedly. "I am sure you do it very nicely."

"Well, anyhow, better than Helena," Gregory admitted. "She hurries so." Lee instructed him to confine his observations to his own performance. Now was the time for him to deliver a small sermon on prayer to Helena. He recognized this, but he was merely incensed by it. What could he reply if they questioned him about his own devotions? Should he acknowledge that he thought prayer was no more than a pleasant form of administering to a sense of self-importance? Or, at most, a variety of self-help? Luckily they didn't ask. How outraged Fanny would be—he would be driven from the community—if he confessed the slightest of his doubts to his children. If, say at the table, when they were all together, he should drop his negative silence, his policy of nonintervention, what a horrified breathlessness would follow. His children, Lee thought, his wife, the servants in the kitchen, none knew him; he was a stranger to his own house.

If he had still, quite desperately, instinctively, looked to Helena and Gregory for assistance, he had met a final failure. Brushed with sleepiness they were slipping away from him. He was reluctant to have them go, leave him; the distance between them and himself appeared to widen immeasurably as he stood watching them settle for the night. He wanted to call them back, "Helena and Gregory, Gregory!" But he remained quiet, his head a little bent, his heart heavy. The tide of sleep, silent, mystical, recompensing! It wasn't that, exactly, he was facing.

Switching off the light he went into their playroom, scattered with bright toys, with alphabet blocks and an engine, a train of cars and some lengths of track, and a wooden steamboat on wheels gaily painted. Already these things had a look of indifferent treatment, of having been half cast aside. Gregory had wanted a typewriter; his jacket, at dancing-school, had been belted like his, Lee Randon's. They each had, in the lower hall, a bicycle on which they rode to and from school and to play. "Will he need me later?" Lee asked himself; "or will it be the same till the end?" But he had already decided that the latter was infinitely better.

He lingered on the second floor, putting off from minute to minute the unavoidable taking up of Fanny's demands. She was, he knew, waiting for his appearance to begin again energetically. In their room it struck him forcibly that he must make some mental diagram of his course, his last unshakable position. Certainly in admitting that he had called Savina Grove by her first name he had justified Fanny's contention that he had kissed her. Fanny should have asked him how many times that had occurred. "A hundred," he heard himself, in fancy, replying. By God, he would like to say just that, and have it all over, done with. Instead he must lie cunningly, imperturbably, and in a monumental patience. Why? He hadn't, pointedly, asked that before. Things here, his life, the future, must be held together.

After he had descended, he lingered in the hall: in the room where his wife was sitting not a sound was audible, there wasn't an indication of her presence. Lee turned away to the mantel-piece dominated by Cytherea. Here, he addressed himself silently to the doll, you're responsible for this. Get me out of it. I'll put it all in your hands, that hand you have raised and hold half open and empty. But his, he added, in an embittered lightness, was an affair of matrimony; it was a moral knot; and it had nothing to do with Cytherea, with the shape, the sea, the island, of Venus. She was merely disdainful.

Fanny was seated in the chair, the exact position, in which he had left her. And when he returned to the place he had deserted, she took no notice of him.

Her eyes were fixed in thought, her lips pinched. Was it only now, or had he never noticed it before, that her hands resembled her face, bony with a dry fine skin? Perhaps, heroically, she was thrusting the whole subject of Savina Grove from her mind; he couldn't tell; her exterior showed Lee Randon nothing, He waited, undecided if he'd smoke. Lee didn't, he found, want to. She shook her head, a startled look passed through her eyes, and Fanny sighed deeply. She seemed to come back from a far place. It was, of course, the past, her early aspirations; herself, young; but what, out of her remembrance, had she brought with her?

* * * * *

Nothing.

Her first words instantly dispelled what had many aspects of his last hope for peace. "It is surprising to me that you could go up to the children; but I suppose we must all be glad to have you pay attention to them at any time." This minor development he succeeded in avoiding. "I have been thinking hard," she continued, "and I have made up my mind about you; it is this—you just simply have to be different. I won't let you, us, stay like this. It is hideous."

"You are quite right," he admitted; "and I have already agreed that the change must principally be in me. If you'd explain it to me, what you have decided on, we'll find out, if possible, how to go about it."

"At least you needn't be sarcastic," she replied; "I am not as impossible as you make out. You will have to be different at home—"

"I thought it was outside home you objected to."

"It's one and the same," she went on; "and I won't have them, it, a minute longer. Not a minute! You have got to behave yourself."

"You haven't been very definite yet."

"Mrs. Grove—Savina," she flung back at him.

"That is a name and not a fact."

"It's a fact that you kissed her." Fanny leaned forward, flushed and tense, knocking over her stool. "And that you put your arms around her, and said—oh, I don't know what you did say. Did she mention me?"

"Only indirectly," he replied with a gleam of malice; "neither of us did."

"I am glad of that anyhow." But her vindictive tone betrayed the words. "Although I can easily guess why you didn't—you were ashamed. You did kiss her; why won't you admit it?"

"What's the good? You've done that for me. You have convinced yourself so positively that nothing I could say would be of any use."

"Did she call you Lee?"

"Hell, Fanny, what a God-forsaken lot of young nonsense!" His anger was mounting. "You can understand here as well as later that I am not going to answer any of it; and I'll not listen to a great deal more. Sometimes, lately, you have been insulting, but now you are downright pathetic, you are so ridiculous."

"You will stay exactly where you are until I get done." Her tone was perceptibly shriller. "And don't you dare call me pathetic; if you only knew—disgracing yourself in New York, with a family at home. It is too common and low and vulgar for words: like a travelling salesman. But I'll make you behave if I have to lock you up."

Lee Randon laughed at her; and, at the contempt in his mirth, she rose, no longer flushed, but white with wrath. "I won't have it!" Her voice was almost a scream, and she brought her hands down so violently on the table that, as she momentarily broke the circuit of the electric lamp, there was a flash of greenish light. It was exactly as though her fury, a generated incandescence of rage, had burned into a perceptible flare. This, he realized, was worse than he had anticipated; he saw no safe issue; it was entirely serious. Lee was aware of a vague sorrow, a wish to protect Fanny, from herself as much as anything; but he was powerless. At the same time, with the support of no affection, without interest, his patience was rapidly vanishing. He was conscious of Fanny not as his wife, nor as a being lost in infinite suffering, but as a woman with her features strangely, grotesquely, twisted and drawn.

His principal recognition was that she meant nothing to him; she wasn't even familiar; he couldn't credit the fact that they had long lived together in an entire intimacy. Dissolved by his indifference, the past vanished like a white powder in a glass of water. She might have been a woman overtaken by a mental paroxysm in the cold impersonality of a railway station. "Stop it," he commanded sharply; "you are hysterical, all kinds of a fool."

"Only one kind," she corrected him, in a voice so rasped that it might have come from a rusted throat; "and I'm not going to be it much longer. You have cured me, you and that Savina. But what—what makes me laugh is how you thought you could explain and lie and bully me. Anything would do to tell me, I'd swallow it like one of those big grapes." She was speaking in gusts, between the labored heavings of her breast; her eyes were staring and dark; and her hands opened and shut, shut and opened, continuously. Fanny's cheeks were now mottled, there were fluctuating spots of red, blue shadows, on the pallor of her skin.

"In a minute more you'll be sick," he warned her.

"Oh, God," she whispered, "that's all he knows, all he feels! In a minute, a minute, I'll be sick. Don't you see, you damned fool," her voice rose until it seemed impossible that she could hold the pitch, "can't you understand I am dying?"

"No." His terseness was calculated: that, he thought, would best control her wildness. "No one could be more alive. If I were you, though, I'd go up to bed; we've had enough of this, or I have; I can't speak for you. But, however that may be, and as I've said before, it has got to stop, now, at once."

If it didn't, he continued silently, he wouldn't be eternally responsible for himself; never a patient man, what might follow the end of his endurance was unpredictable. His feeling toward the woman before him was shifting, as well; the indifference was becoming bitterness; the bitterness glittered, like mica, with points of hatred. He felt this, like an actual substance, a jelly-like poison, in his blood, affecting his body and mind. It bred in him a refined brutality, an ingenious cruelty. "A mirror would shut you up quicker than anything else," he informed her; "you look like a woman of sixty—go somewhere and fix your face."

"It doesn't surprise me you are insulting," she replied, "but I didn't expect it quite so soon. I thought you might hide what you really were a little longer; it seemed to me you might try to keep something. But I guess it's better to have it all done with at once, and to meet the worst."

"You talk as though there were no one but you in this," he said concisely; "and that I didn't matter. You'll find that I have a little to say. Here it is: I am tired of your suspicions and questions and insinuations. You haven't any idea of marriage except as a bed-room farce. You're so pure that you imagine more indecencies in a day than I could get through with in five years. If there were one I hadn't thought of, you'd have me at it in no time. It was pleasant at the Groves' because there was none of this infernal racket. Mrs. Grove, no —Savina, is a wise woman. I was glad to be with her, to get away—"

"Go back, then!" Fanny cried. "Don't bother about me and your home and the children. You brought me here, and made me have them, all the blood and tearing; but that doesn't matter. Not to you! I won't let you touch me again."

"That needn't trouble you," he assured her.

"Not ... when you have her ... to touch." She could scarcely articulate, each word was pronounced as though it had cost a separate and strangling effort. "You vile, rotten coward!"

The flood of her hysteria burst so suddenly that, unprepared, he was overwhelmed with its storm of tears and passionate charges. "You ought to be beaten till you fell down. You wouldn't say these things to me, treat me like this, if I weren't helpless, if I could do anything. But I can't, and you are safe. I am only your wife and not some filthy woman in New York." As she moved her head the streaming tears swung out from her face. "God damn you." Her hand went out to the table and, rising, it held the heavy dull yellow paper cutter. Before he could draw back she struck him; the copper point ripped down his jaw and hit his shoulder a jarring blow.

In an instant of passion Lee Randon caught Fanny by the shoulders and shook her until her head rolled as though her neck were broken. Even in his transport of rage, with his fingers dug into her flesh, he stopped to see if this were true.

It wasn't. She swayed uncertainly, dazed and gasping, while her hair, shaken loose from its knot, slowly cascaded over one shoulder. Then stumbling, groping, with a hand on a chair, against the frame of the door, she went out of the room.

* * * * *

Lee's jaw bled thickly and persistently; the blood soaked, filled, his handkerchief; and, going to the drawer in the dining-room where the linen was kept, he secured and held against a ragged wound a napkin, He was nauseated and faint. His rage, killed, as it were, at its height, left him with a sensation of emptiness and degradation. The silence— after the last audible dragging footfall of Fanny slowly mounting the stairs—was appalling: it was as though all the noise of all the world, concentrated in his head, had been stopped at once and forever. He removed the sop from the cut, and the bleeding promptly took up its spreading over his throat and under his collar. That blow had killed a great deal: the Lee Randon married to Fanny was already dead; Fanny, too, had told him that she was dying, killed from within. It was a shame.

He was walking when it occurred to him that he had better keep quiet; if the blood didn't soon stop he should require help; he was noticeably weak. His feeling with regard to Fanny was confined to curiosity, but mainly his thoughts, his illimitable disgust, were directed at himself. His anger, returning like the night wind from a different direction, cut at himself, at the collapse of his integrity. He was, in reality, frightened at what had been no better than a relapse into a state of mania; he was shocked at the presence, however temporary, of a frenzy of madness.

Nothing had altered his attitude toward the woman who was his wife; all his active emotions for her had gone. Then his attention was drawn from his personality to his life, his surroundings; they were suffocating. Not to be borne! Nowhere could he discover a detail, an episode, that had the importance of reality. He had a sensation of being wrapped in a feather bed, the need to make a violent gesture—sending the white fluff whirling through space—and so be free to breathe. This house, the symmetrical copied walls, the harmonious rugs, symbols of public success and good opinion, the standard of a public approbation, exasperated him beyond endurance. He wanted to push the walls out, tear the rugs into rags, and scatter them contemptuously before the scandalized inertness of Eastlake. Lee had what was regarded as an admirable existence, an admirable family—the world imposed this judgment on him; and the desire, the determination, swept over him to smash to irremediable atoms what was so well applauded.

The thought fascinated him: to break his life wide open. He'd let it go, it was worthless to him, the companies and bonds and the woman and children, the jog-trotting on fenced roads, the vain pretentions of the country club, the petty grasping at the petticoats—where they were worn—of variety. Lee wished that he could do this in the presence of everyone he knew; he wanted to see their outraged faces, hear the shocked expressions, as he insulted, demolished, all that they worshipped. The blood, he found, had stopped; his hurt was relatively unimportant. The fever of rebellion, of destruction, increased in him until it was as violent, as blinding, as his earlier fury; and he went at once in search of Fanny.

She had undressed, and, in a nightgown effectively drawn with blue ribbons, she lay face down across the bottom of her bed. One shoulder, immaculately white except for the leaden bruises of his fingers, was bare, and an arm, from which her jewelled wrist watch had not been removed, was outstretched. He stood above her, but, breathing faintly, she made no sign of a consciousness of his presence.

"Fanny," he began, speaking with an effort of calmness out of his laboring being, "this is all over for me. As I told you so many times, I've had too much of it. It's yours, anyhow, and the children are yours, and you may do what you like with the whole affair. I'm done." Still she didn't move, reply. "I am going," he said more impatiently, "tonight. I want you to understand that this is final. You were too good a wife; I couldn't keep even with you; and I can't say, now, that I want to. Everyone will tell you that I am no good—you see, I haven't the shadow of a cause for leaving—and the best thing you can do is believe them. If I had what was recognized as a reason for going, I'd stay, if that has any sense; you may put your own interpretation on it."

She turned and half rose, regarding him from the edge of the bed. Her face, no longer brightly mottled, was sunken, and dull with despair. "I can't talk," she said; "the words are all hard like stones down in my heart. You'll have to go; I can't stop you; I knew you had gone yesterday, or was it last week? I saw it was a hopeless fight but I tried, I had to; I thought your memory would help."

"It wasn't Savina who did this," he informed her; "I want you to realize that fully. Whatever happens, she is not to blame. All, all the fault is mine; it would take too long to explain, you wouldn't believe me—you couldn't—and so I am deserting you. That is the word for it, the one you will use." Fanny gazed at him in a clouding perplexity.

"I can't think it's true." Her voice was dazed. "A thing like this couldn't be happening to us, to me. It's only for a little, we are both cross—"

He cut her short with the assurance that what he said he meant. Sentimental indulgence, he felt, was dangerously out of place. She slipped back, supine, on the bed; and, with short sobs, she cried, "Go! Go! Go!"

In his room he methodically and thoughtfully assembled the necessities for his bag; he was arranging mentally the details of his act. Where, primarily, it affected Fanny and the children, his lawyers could handle it best; it was the present consequences to himself, the step immediately before him, that demanded consideration. But his deliberation was lost in the knowledge that he would go to New York where, inevitably, he should see Savina. No one could predict what would determine that; it would unfold, his affair with Savina must conclude, as it had begun—in obedience to pressures beyond their control. An increasing excitement flowed over him at the thought of being with her, possessing her, again. There was no doubt of that in his mind; he knew that Savina would come to him. She was far more ruthless in brushing aside artificial barriers, prejudices, than, until now, he. The figure of William Grove occupied him for a little, but he seemed insubstantial, not so much a being as a convention to be smashed in his own house.

Lee Randon decided not to speak again, to say good-bye, to Fanny. It would only multiply the difficulties of his leaving; she might have another attack of rage, or—worse—of affection. He was amazed at his lack of feeling, a little disturbed: perhaps there was something fatally wrong, lacking, about him, and he was embarked on the first violent stage of physical and mental degradation. It couldn't be helped, he told himself, once more down stairs, in the hall. Beyond, the stool lay where Fanny had kicked it; and he bent over to pick up the copper paper cutter from the floor. Putting it on the table, he reflected that Fanny would, in all probability, destroy it. His handkerchief, stiff, black with dried blood, was in the crystal ash holder with a mahogany stand; and that, as unnecessarily unpleasant, he hid in a pocket.

The electric globe in the floor lamp was yellow; it was nearly burned out and would have to be replaced. This had been his special corner, the most comfortable in the pen. But the pig, he remembered, had been slaughtered last week; and he wondered if the parallel he had established would hold true to the end. In the main aspect, he concluded, yes. But the pig had died without experiencing what was, undoubtedly, both the fundamental duty and recompense of living. The pig, happily or unhappily, had remained in ignorance of Cytherea and the delights of love; but, perhaps, if only for the moment, he had better call that passion; it was a word of clearer, more exact, definition.

He left the house walking, carrying his bag up the hill into Eastlake: a train left for the city at eleven-fifty-eight. Lee turned, beyond his property, and saw the light burning in what had been his and Fanny's room; the rest of the house, except for the glimmer below, was dark. The winter night was encrusted with stars. A piercing regret seized him—that he was past the middle of forty and not in the early twenties. To be young and to know Savina! To be young and free. To be young ... the increasing rapidity with which he went forward had the aspect of an endeavor to waste no more precious time.



V

The brief level voice of Savina Grove arranging over the telephone an hour, very late in the afternoon, for him to call, gave Lee a comparatively long time in which to examine his feelings, particularly 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 immediate action, evaded him. He should have to consult her about them. What he most firmly grasped of all was that he couldn't—what, in reality, he breathed to himself was they—remain in New York. The comparatively orderly and delayed legal arrangement projected by the Morrises and Mina Raff seemed to have no application to the impetuosity of the situation before him. However, he was advancing at a speed, to a position, for which there was no warrant. None at all. Perhaps Savina, satisfied by the one occasion which—he had been so careful to insist— must be the last, would regard him as merely importunate.

Strictly held to discretion by the fact of Fanny, Savina might have found him then—more available than when free—only the acceptable model of an indiscreet man. Yet, he reminded himself, he hadn't left Eastlake, broken wide open 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 stress of existence. But, he was forced to add, the collapse had been hastened by his knowledge of Savina. And this brought him to the examination of what, at bottom, she meant to him. What was her significance, her bulk, in his life?

That could be approached only through an understanding of his feeling for her, what it was now and what it might become; not conspicuously easy of comprehension. Lee tried the old, the long inaccurately used, word, love. He asked himself the question squarely—did 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 tried a simpler approach—did he want to be with Savina more than with anyone else? At last he had put a question to himself that he could answer: he most assuredly preferred being with Savina to anyone else he knew. But that alone would not have taken him to her.

A simple desire on his part, naive like a daisy, could not have overthrown the structure of his being. Yet the connection between the two, the woman and the event, was undeniable, his impulse to go to her now irresistible. That last word, as fully as any, expressed what lately had happened to him. He was considering the occurrences logically while the fact was that logic hadn't been touched 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 was he searching for an exterior justification of his present anomalous position, for, briefly, an excuse; excuses were the furthest of all things from his mind. The truth was that he was decidedly exhilarated, as though he had left the hard narrow road for a gallop over the green. He was merely dwelling on, analyzing, the present as it was becoming the newly promising, the opening, future.

But he did need to understand—for an attitude, a choice of speech, if nothing else—his feeling for Savina. It consisted principally in the tyrannical desire to be with her, to sink in the immeasurable depths of her passion, and 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 manner of an incoming tide and a low- water rock. Abruptly, after a certain misleading appearance of hesitation on the part of the waves, he had gone under. Well, it was very pleasant. In his case the celebrated maxims were wrong.

He left this, for the moment, and returned to what, actually, lay ahead of him. Would Savina go away with him, leave the correct William, the safety of their New York house in the style of eighteen-eighty? Lee considered in her two impulses, not alike—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 from the Harriman Bank twenty thousand dollars. So much had not been necessary; it was very bad business to segregate in idleness such a sum of money now; but he enjoyed the extravagance of it. Prudence, frugality, was no longer a factor in his affairs.

His present personal liberty, more complete than it had ever been before—than, he added lightly, it might ever be again—was astonishingly soothing. Sitting comfortably in a room in his customary hotel, there wasn't a pressure that could be brought to bear on him. It was now twenty minutes past four, he was to go 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 not only been indifferent to but actually disliked. He could lie down—he had been up the entire past night—and be called in an hour; he could sit as he was, in an unbuttoned waistcoat with his legs comfortably spread out; he could motor or walk on Fifth Avenue; smoke; drink—all in an inviolable security of being.

Or, going back to that moment when he had, so mistakenly, turned aside from visionary promptings to a solid comfortable career, he might—what was it?—write. Perhaps his sharp regret at the loss of his youth was premature, youth itself comparatively unimportant. But no, that would involve him in fresh distasteful efforts, imperceptibly it would build up a whole new world of responsibilities: writing would be arduous, editors captious, and articles, stories, books, tie him back again to all that from which he had so miraculously escaped. Savina would be enough. What a beautiful body, so unexpectedly full, she had; how astounding, intoxicating, was the difference between what she seemed to be and what she was. Lee Randon thought with amused pity of the files of men who must have passed by her, with the most considerate bows, in ignorance of the inner truth.

That discovery, while, naturally, it had not been entirely reserved for him, had accumulated in a supreme delight, been kept back, like the best of all presents, for the last. He was glad that it wasn't too late for him to enjoy it. Here, suddenly, intervening in the midst of a prosaic drudgery, a tepid and meaningless period, was a magnificent relief. By God, would he take advantage of it! Would he! There was a knock at the door, and the hotel valet hung a freshly pressed suit in the closet; the shoes into which he intended to change were in a perfection of readiness; laid out were a heavy blue silk shirt and a dull yellow tie. Lee got these various carefully selected articles of dress slowly, exactly, on. His pearl pin Fanny had given him! Well, it was a good pearl, selected personally by a celebrated dealer; and Lee was obliged to her, nothing more. He lighted a cigarette, collected his hat and gloves, his overcoat and stick, and descended in the elevator in a mood of unrestrained enjoyment.

The door attendant, who knew him, whistled for a taxi-cab, commenting lightly on the visible accident to his jaw. But, in spite of it, Lee had an appearance, as he phrased it, of good luck. The world, he said, was evidently in favor of Mr. Randon. The latter agreed that 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 lingering from a crowd was evident; the cups, on all the available surfaces, had not been removed; in a corner were the skeleton-like iron music racks of a small orchestra; ash trays were overflowing; and a sealskin muff, with a bunch of violets pinned to it, had been left.

Savina had gone upstairs, but she would be down at once. Lee was turned away from the door when she entered; she was wearing a cloth dress of dull red—hadn't he heard it called Cuba color?—with a heavy girdle of grotesque intertwined silver figures. With a single glance behind her she swept forward into Lee's arms, her mouth held up to his.

* * * * *

Listening closely to all that he had to say, she sat with her hands quietly folded on crossed knees. Perhaps twice she nodded, comprehendingly. "And so," he 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 the past doesn't need our attention now. The future is the thing. What is it going to be? What," he hesitated, "can we make it? Maybe everything, or nothing."

"Are you leaving that for me to decide?" she asked.

"To a great extent I have to; I don't want to appear to take so much for granted. And then, only you can measure what I have to offer. I believe what I have done is considered serious, if not ruinous; but that I can't help thinking is exaggerated. I haven't been struck down 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. It's quite final, in other words. I must find out, too, if the irregularity upsets you. That need only be temporary. Grove and Fanny, I am sure, wouldn't persist in being disagreeable. But, if they did, we'd have to face that as well, the consequences of my—my impatience.

"No, don't answer so quickly. Do you know me, are you sure you'd be happy, satisfied, with me? I have some money, not a great deal for myself now; I should say fifteen thousand dollars a year. Fanny, very rightfully—for herself and the children—will get most of what I have. And then, are you wedded, if not to your individual life here, to New York? We should have to go away to some place rather vague—"

"Cuba," she broke in.

The irony of that suggestion carried him back to the many vainly projected trips there with Fanny. His brother was in Cuba, it was true; but that might turn out excellently: Daniel would be able to help them in the difficult readjustments to follow. 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 his, not for a solitary stolen night, but for years ... openly, completely. He lost his self control and kissed her, heedless of the open doors. Now she was cooler than Lee, and pushed him away. "William will be in at any minute," she explained:

"When shall we leave?"

"We might take a train tonight for Washington, since we'll need passports and I have to have an income tax receipt, and we can manage all that best there. Then Key West, Havana, anywhere. We will hope to get off without trouble; but, if Grove interferes, accept the consequences as they come."

"Very well." Savina grew still quieter as the march of events became headlong. "I can live without a maid for a while. Tonight I won't 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 in it; my summer things are all out of reach. Washington will be convenient for me, too. Unless you want to see William again—" She rose.

"Not particularly," he acknowledged; "though I wouldn't drive around the city to avoid him. Somehow—I may be blind—I can't think that I am doing him an infamous wrong: that he lost 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, let William watch out for himself; his club, he's so devoted to, won't fail him. Fanny and he will have their whole worlds to sympathize with their injury. We don't need sympathy."

Lee walked back to the hotel, the pig-skin wrapped walking stick swinging from an arm, his bearing confident and relaxed. He stopped at the desk for a conference 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 up and closed his bag: he had time for dinner and several cigars afterwards; he wasn't hungry, but the ceremony would kill the intervening two hours and more.

The porter found him later and delivered his tickets, including the check for a drawing-room, secured as irregularly as possible from the Pullman conductor. There were, it began to seem, to be no minor annoyances. At a few minutes before ten he 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 carrying a jewel case. There wasn't a tremor in her voice or bearing, the slightest indication that they were going farther than a theatre in the vicinity of Forty-fourth Street. Internally, Lee was excited, filled with the long strange sense of holiday.

"William went to the club," Savina told him with a smile edged with malice; "everything was as usual when he left, but when he gets back it will be changed. I'm sorry to miss his expression when he reads the letter I wrote; he won't show it to anyone."

"That sounds as though you really disliked him," Lee observed. Then he remembered the hatred he had felt for Fanny. Matrimony had a brutal hand for superficial relationships and conventions. He had spoken lightly but, watching her, he saw the grimness of her passion strike the animation from her face. The jewel case slid over the softness of her wrap to the floor, her hand crept under his cuff, clinging to his arm.

Going immediately to their train, they found the fruit in the drawing- room; the porter stopped to knock at the door and discover if they were in need of his attendance. They heard dimly the train's muffled boring under the river and 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, reaching Washington, close in a taxi-cab; Savina's jewel case again fell unheeded; and again, after the shortest halt possible, they were whirling south in a drawing-room where night and day were indistinguishable one from the other.

On the rear platform of the orange-painted train moving deliberately along the Florida coast Lee was first aware of the still, saturating heat; that, in itself, was enough to release him from the winter-like grip of Eastlake. He lost all sense of time, of hurry, of the necessity of occupation as 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 by a slow pass of water cutting the harshness of palmettos. On the viaducts he gazed with half-closed eyes across the sapphire and emerald green and purple water; or, directly under him, he looked down incuriously into a tide so clear that it seemed no more than a breath ruffling the sand beneath.

Savina, who had discarded cloth for dull white linen—she wished, she explained, to make the transition as sharply as possible—was more alertly interested in their constantly shifting surroundings; they were significant to her as the milestones of her incredible escape. On the steamer for Havana, marking their effects deposited in a cabin with a double iron bed and unpleasantly ubiquitous basins, she explained to Lee that she never got seasick; 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; the vibration of the propeller became a sub-conscious murmur; over the placid water astern a rippling phosphorescence was stirred and subsided. A motion, increasing by imperceptible degrees, affected the deck; there was a rise and fall, regular and sleep-impelling: the uneasiness of the Gulf Stream. Havana floated into their waking vision, a city of white marble set in lustrous green, profound indigo, against the rosy veil of a morning sun.

* * * * *

The fortunate chance that took them to the Inglaterra Hotel—the disdain of its runner was more persuasive than the clamor of all the others who had boarded the steamer—found them a room, they soon discovered, in what was at once the most desirable and the most unlikely place. 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 floor, the hall, they crossed, engaged his interest; not alone for the height of the ceiling, which was excessive, but because of the palms, the pointed Moorish arches filled with green painted wood lattices; the totality of an effect different from anything else he had seen.

Their room, with the lift of the ceiling emphasized by the confined space, was more engaging still: tall slatted doors opened on an iron railed balcony, the bath-room was like a tunnel on end, and the floor an expanse of polished mosaic in a pattern of yellow and grey. Lee walked 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 graceful dense foliage, and innumerable stacked iron chairs about the marble statue of a man with a pointing hand. These details, however, were slowly gathered from an effect the whole of which was bewilderingly white, a whiteness intolerably luminous in the dazzling bath of the sun.

It was a scene, a city, Lee recognized, more foreign to his own than any he knew in western Europe; a difference that existed mainly in the tropical heat, visible in languorous waves rising from blanched walls and streets already—so early—fervent. Savina was filled 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 what we accepted so long for living. I suppose the wonderful thing is that we escaped. Lee, do you realize that almost no one does? They never never get away, but go from one grave, from one winter, to another. Isn't it strange, when what we did is so very easy.

"I'd like to tell a hundred people in New York that they could get away too, unfreeze themselves. When we drove horses I used to be surprised that they went along so quietly in blinders; they never seemed to learn that one kick would break into 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 contentment in what they had done. It was exactly as Savina had said—the forces which had held them in a rigorous northern servitude had proved, upon assault, to be no more than a defense of painted prejudices, the canvas embrasures of hypocrisy.

"It is astonishing, what so many people put up with," he agreed; "but then," Lee added, in a further understanding, "it isn't so much what you knock down as what you carry away, take everywhere, inside 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 get away from the past, or put out of their minds what they are brought up on. Privately they would think they were wicked, damned, or some such truck; and, sure enough, that alone would finish them."

"I haven't a speck of that," Savina admitted serenely; "I am happy. And I don't even have to ignore the thought of your wife and children; they'll get along just as well, maybe better, without you. William doesn't need me; he hasn't for a number of years. But we had to have each other."

Lee Randon considered this in relation to his feeling that he had not left Eastlake, Fanny, because of Savina. He was still convinced that his life had fallen apart of itself; but he began to see that Savina had been more 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 the only admirable, the only permissible, course was valid with him unless he had a corroborating belief. And all that he might once have possessed had left him at the final blow dealt by the passion of Savina and himself.

She had been stronger than the assembled forces of heredity and precept and experience; her strength was superhuman; it was incredible that her slender body could hold such an impulse, a fury really, of vitality. Women must 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, they went down to breakfast in a dining-room with a marble floor and walls lustrous with bronze tiling. They had tall glasses of iced orange juice; and, with the last fragrant draught of coffee, Lee lighted a long bland cigar.

"If you like," he proceeded comfortably, "you may rush around and see as much of the city as possible. There is a big omnibus at the door. Personally, I am going to do nothing of the kind. I intend 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 burned, monuments, just annoy me; and picture galleries give me colds in the head. Above all else I don't want to be improved; if I hear a fact of any sort I am going to bed for the rest of the day."

"I don't care about those, either," Savina assented; "but the stores, yes. I have to have a mantilla and a high 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 it I'd bring back a shell jacket covered with green braid and a wide scarlet sash, or whatever an espada wears."

"A guitar and a carnation ought to do," he responded. "Count on me for nothing until the evening, when, if you care to, we'll drive along the sea, one way and then the other, and have dinner where we happen to be. I hope you will wear the most extravagant and holiday clothes—white, and very ruffled and thin, would be nice, with emeralds."

"It's a good thing I have a lot of money," she observed; "you have some, of course, but it wouldn't begin to support your ambitions."

"I don't even care which of us has it," he admitted; "so it's there. A year ago I should have looked pained and insisted 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, though, luckily; but if you did bring the emeralds I saw you wearing in New York don't throw them away on my account."

"They are here," she assured him. "William gave them to me when we were married."

"Splendid, together with Fanny's pearl," he replied placidly; "I was afraid they had been a legacy from your mother. I much prefer them to have been William's—it will give them such a Utopian sparkle."

When Savina had gone, in a long brightly-painted car summoned from the line backed at the plaza's edge, Lee Randon returned to their room. The heat of the day, approaching noon, the ceaseless noise of Havana rose diffused to the balcony where he sat until the circling sunlight forced him to move inside. What amazing comfort! A curiously impersonal 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 entirely, deliciously, decorative. The black brocade mules by her bed were characteristic of her—useless charming objects that had cost twenty, thirty, dollars. Their sliding tap on the glazed floor was an appreciable part of his happiness; Savina's bottles on a dressing-table were engraved crystal with gold stoppers: it was all as it should be.

* * * * *

When she returned she redressed her hair, drawing it back across her ears, put in at a provocative angle a fan-like carved shell comb, and twisted a shawl of flame-colored silk—it was a manton, she instructed him—about her shoulders. The guise of Andalusia was very becoming to her. For a dinner, Savina wore the filmy white and emeralds; they went 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 Morro Castle marked the rocky thrust of the land. The restaurant was crowded: beyond Lee were four officers of the Spanish navy in snowy linen and corded gilt; in the subdued light the faces of women, under wide flowery hats, were illusive and fascinating; everywhere the deep crimson of Castilian wines was set against the amber radiance of champagne.

Directly below, shadowy trees hid the stone margin of the bay, and an enormous tripod, such as might be used for removing the cargoes of ships, raised its primitive simplicity. "Look, Lee!" Savina laid a hand on his wrist. A steamer, incredibly large and near, was moving slowly out through the narrow channel to the sea. Rows of golden lights shone on its decks and from 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 then it will be night. But, principally, we will never go back—never! never! never! We will be together for years. Let's go to the hotel now; Lee. I am rather tired; it's the heat, don't you think? I am worn, and, because I am so happy, a trifle dizzy. Not much. Nothing to worry about. But I only want you, Lee; in my heart I don't care for the valleys and bells and scents."

Yet, before they reached the hotel they stopped, Savina insisted, for cocktails of Bacardi rum, fragrant with fresh limes and sweet with a crust of sugar that remained 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?" she cried. "Hark, Lee, that horrible sound." The air was filled with a drumming wail, a dislocated savage music, that affected him like a nightmare grown audible.

"It's coming from across the street, from the Opera House," he told her; "some kind of a dance, I'm certain." Patently it was an orchestra, but the instruments that composed it, the measures woven of frantic screaming notes and dull stale iterations, he had no means of identifying. "Bedlam in the jungle," he said soothingly. She wished it would stop. Soon he agreed with her; 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 a meaninglessness; it assumed a potency, a naked reality, more profound than anything in his previous knowledge. It was the voice of a crazed and debased passion. To Lee, it seemed to strip him of his whiteness, his continence, his integrity, to flay him of every particle of restraint and decency, and set him, bestial and exposed, in a ball room with glass-hung chandeliers.

Incomprehensibly the fluctuating clamor—he could distinguish low pitched drums—brought him the vision, pale and remote and mysteriously smiling, of Cytherea. He thought of that torrential discord rising around her belled purple skirt, the cool yellow of her waist crossed with fragile lace, beating past her lifted slender 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 his Eastlake house. He would have said, unhesitatingly, that the formal melody of the eighteenth century, of Scarlatti and harpsichords, was the music that best accompanied Cytherea. But she dominated, haunted with her grace, the infernal dinning sound of unspeakable defilements. Savina was racked beyond endurance:

"I can't stand it any longer," she told Lee hysterically, risen with her palms pressed to her ears. "I can hear it with every nerve. It will never go out of my brain. You must stop it. Can't you understand that it is driving me mad!" Her voice grew so shrill, she trembled so violently, that he had to hold her forcibly in his arms. When, toward dawn, it ceased, Savina was exhausted; she lay limp and white on her bed; and, across the room, he could hear the shallowness 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 sweep of a traffic moving to the blasts of multitudinous horns. When she woke, past ten, drinking the small cup of black coffee which locally accompanied dressing, she was still shaken. "That's the most cursed racket anyone ever had to endure!" A growing irritation made harsh his voice. "You couldn't torment a worse sound out of a thousand cats." She smiled wanly. "If we were like that in the past," he added, "I'm glad we changed, even if we are worse in other ways."

"I could hear myself screaming and screaming," Savina said. In the heated room she had an uncontrollable chill. "Lee, I can't bring myself 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 buried in her embroidered pillow, half clothed in web-like garments threaded with black ribbons, she cowered in an abject and pitiful agony.

Later, he discovered that, within the scope of his possible knowledge, his conjecture had been right: a danzon, a native Cuban ball—not, the director of the Inglaterra gave him to understand, 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." She shuddered. It was evident that the distressing effect on her of the music lingered through the day; her energy gave way to a passive contentment hardly removed from listlessness.

They drove, at the end of afternoon, on the Malecon, following the curving sea wall from La Punta to the scattered villas of Vedado. The sea and sky were grey; or was it blue? At the horizon they met without a perceptible change; 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 tide like a smooth undulating mist ... and there were lights crowning the Cabanas fortress; the passing cars made the familiar geometrical patterns with the cold bars of their lamps; they were wrapped in darkness; night had come.

Savina didn't want to go back to the hotel, their room; and, after dinner at the Paris, they went to Carmelo, where they alternated northern dances with the stridor of a northern cabaret and drinks. Savina's spirits revived slowly. To Lee she seemed to have changed in appearance since she left New York—here, losing 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 public. In a way, without losing her distinction, she had become evident; another woman, one less admirably balanced, would have been conspicuous. Havana was like a, stage on which Savina—with a considered bravado they had kept the Randon—tried with intoxicating success a part she had long and secretly desired.

* * * * *

What, Lee found, he most enjoyed was the personal liberty he had first experienced in New York, waiting to see Savina after he had definitely left Eastlake. All the aspects of his circumferential existence, island-like in the dividing indigo of a magic sea, pleased him equally. Of course, without Savina Cuba would have 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 the long pink wall of the Cabanas, while Savina drove and shopped and rested. Carefully avoiding the Americans at the Inglaterra, on the streets, he had no burden of empty mutual assurances, the forced stupidities of conversations, to support. His days all had the look of a period of rest after a strain of long duration.

The strain, he realized, unknown to him at the time, had existed negatively through years before he had grown openly rebellious. A quality within him, in spite of him, had risen and swept him, under the eyes of Cytherea, beyond every circumstance of his former life. The resemblance between her and Savina he caught in fleet glances which defied his efforts to summon them; and, where 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 insatiable murmur at his ear. Yet his happiness with Savina was absolute, secure; and still totally different from her attitude toward him. She often repeated, in a voice no longer varying from her other impassioned speech, that she loved him; and, while this was a phrase, a reassurance, no man in his situation could escape, he returned it in a manner not wholly ringing with conviction.

It was the old difficulty—he wasn't sure, he couldn't satisfy himself, about its meaning. He was not, for example, lost beyond knowledge or perception in his feeling for Savina; carried along in the tempestuous flood of her emotion, 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 directed to one never-lost-sight-of end; but he disposed his attention in a hundred channels. Lee began to be aware of the tremendous single economy of women, the constant bending back of their instincts to a single preeminent purpose.

Yet everywhere, now, women had concentrated in a denial of that: the men he knew hadn't a monopoly of restlessness. Even Fanny, in the parading of all her rings, had not been oblivious of it. But it wasn't so much that women denied their fundamental urgency as it was that they wanted it exercised under other, more rapturous, conditions. Inexplicably, 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. There were, immediately, the practical developments of his undertaking to be met. He served nothing by putting them off. He must write, but through his lawyers, to William Grove and find out what action he proposed to take, what arrangements for divorce could be facilitated. A letter—there could be no saving impersonality here—to Fanny was more difficult.

From Havana, his approval of Fanny was very complete; he understood her, made allowances, now better than at any time during their marriage; given what, together, 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 good qualities had come to so little. The thing for him to do was to see his brother, and move part of the burden of his decisions over to Daniel's heavy frame.

The sugar estate of which he was Administrador was in the Province of Camagey, at Cobra; an overnight trip from Havana, Lee had learned. It was Sunday 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 then. The other desirable hotels were as full as the Inglaterra. He must wire, but the composition of his telegram presented an unexpected difficulty:

Lee didn't know how to explain the presence with him of Savina; he couldn't determine how much or how little to say; and it was probable that Daniel had had a cable from Eastlake. The mere putting down of the necessary words of his message, under the concerned gaze of a clerk, with a limited comprehension of English, was hazardous. The clerk, he had discovered, would read in a loud voice of misplaced 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—what accommodations he might offer were problematic. Lee, from the heading of a letter, could not build the proportions of a Casa Vivienda. Well, there would be a hotel at Cobra! That answered his doubts—Savina and he would go to Cobra and there communicate with Daniel. It would be easy to talk privately with him. Lee didn't want his approval, but only his careful opinions and reasonable assistance.

He, Lee, would not produce Savina with the triumphant indication that her resistless charm explained everything. He was no such fatuous fool! But, studying her, he got a solid assurance from the superiority of her person. 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 heroic bronze statue of a dancing girl in a manton; on the table between them was, at that hour, the inevitable small pitcher of Daiquiri cocktails. He told Savina what had been in his thoughts, and she nodded her approval:

"I agree that we ought to see your brother, and, through him, communicate with New York. At present things are much too uncertain. If William, or your wife, were different they could 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, if William were a vulgar man, the fuss! But," she admitted, "at bottom I shouldn't have cared. You are not half as disreputable as I am, Lee. You have a proper look at this minute."

"Really," he protested, "there is no reason for you to be insulting, when I deliberately led you astray."

"You do flatter yourself," Savina replied; "when it was I all the time: I broke up your home."

"You needn't boast so loudly and pain everyone about us," he protested cheerfully. She gazed contemptuously at the surrounding tables:

"The scheming presidents of concessions and their fat wives. Have you noticed the men hurrying away apologetically in the evening, Lee? The places 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 on the privileges sacred to men. It's all right for them to do this, to go out to an appointment after ten o'clock and come back at two satisfied—"

"Savina," he interrupted her, "I know all that you were going to say, I could repeat it to you in your own words. You were about to assault the double standard. Consider it done. You are right. Everyone with sense is right there. But if I hear it again I'll think I am at Aeolian Hall listening to an English author lecture. I'll put you in your car on Forty-second Street and send you home."

"You can't send me home," she reminded him; "you are too proper and have too many scruples. You'll have to stay with me now for life. I am ruined." They laughed happily.

"You are," he echoed her.

"Isn't it nice?"

"Nothing better could be invented."

She investigated the pitcher. "The last drop."

Lee Randon signalled for the waiter, but she stopped him; the strained intensity of her face, the shining darkness of her eyes, set his heart pounding.

* * * * *

They left for Cobra without even the formality of a telegraphed announcement to Daniel Randon. Their compartment, in the middle of the car, with the more casual open accommodations at either end, resolute in its bare varnished coolness, indicated what degree of heat they might expect in the interior. The progress of the train through the length of the island was slow and irregular: Lee had a sense of insecure tracks, of an insufficient attention to details of transportation that required an endless, untiring oversight. Naturally they 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 coffee of the train, and oranges bought by Lee at a junction, no breakfast was possible; and they watched uninterruptedly the leisurely passing land. Marks of sugar planting multiplied, the cane, often higher than Lee's head, was cut into sections by wide lanes; and announced by a sickly odor of fermentation, he saw, with a feeling of disappointment, the high corrugated iron sides of a grinding mill. It was without any saving picturesque quality; and the noise of its machinery, a heavy crushing rumble, was perceptible on the train.

However, Savina was attracted by the high carts, on two solid wheels, and drawn by four or six oxen, hauling the cut cane. But the villages they passed, single streets of unrelieved squalor in a dusty waste, they decided were immeasurably depressing. No one who could avoid it walked; lank 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 tears," Savina declared. But he showed her pastures of rich tufted grass with herds of well-conditioned cattle. "I wish we were there," she said. But, when the train stopped at Cobra, Savina, hesitating on the step, proposed that they go on into Camagey, hardly more than an hour distant.

Their bags, put off, the rapid incomprehensible speech of the guard, left them, with the train moving doubtfully on, at Cobra. It was, on examination, more dismal than, from the detachment of the compartment, they had realized. The usual baked ground, the dusty underbrush, the blank faades of the low buildings 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 with an instinctive antagonism. "Do you think that can be the hotel?" he asked, indicating a long plaster building with a shallow upper porch supported on iron-footed wooden columns. Above its closely-shuttered windows, in letters faded and blistered by the sun, reached the description, "Hotel de Cobra."

"We can't stay there," he continued decidedly; "I'll send for Daniel at once."

Without available help he carried their bags to the entrance of the hotel, and went into a darkened room with a cement floor which had the thick dampness of an interior saturated with spilled acid wine. There he found a man, not different from those outside, who, incapable 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 which they were ushered had, at least, the advantage of bareness: there was a wardrobe of mahogany leaning precariously forward, a double bed deeply sagged with a grey- white covering, a wash stand and tin basin and pitcher, and some short sturdy rush-bottomed chairs.

Its principal feature, however, was the blue paint that covered the walls, a blue of a particularly insistent shade which, in the solidity of its expanse, seemed to make all the enclosed space and objects livid. The tall shutters on one side, Lee discovered, opened 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 three, but they were so loosely fat that they filled every inch. Their faces were drenched with powder and you could see their revolting breasts through their muslin dresses; terrible creatures reeking with unspeakable cologne. They laughed at me, cursed us, I am sure."

"We'll have to put up with it till Daniel comes," he observed philosophically; and, on the low straight chairs, they gazed around so disgustedly that they both laughed. "I suppose he is out somewhere in the 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 is important. The least thing gone wrong might cost thousands of dollars." The correctness of his assumption was upheld by an announcement unintelligible except for the comforting fact that Daniel was below.

"Perhaps I had better see him first," Lee suggested diplomatically, and Savina assented.

Daniel Randon was both tall and fat, a slow impressive bulk in white linen with a smooth impassive face and considering brown eyes. "This," he said unremarkably, "is a surprise. But I am, of course, glad; particularly since Venalez reported that Fanny was with you."

"She isn't," Lee replied tersely; there had been no cable from Eastlake, he saw, and he must plunge boldly into what he had to say. "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 his brother's contained mouth. "No, you are making a mistake. I have left Fanny, Daniel. I thought perhaps you would have heard."

"Our telegraph system is undependable," was all that the other, the younger, Randon answered.

"You don't know, then. A Mrs. Grove is with me; but she is that only until the divorces can be arranged; and I counted on you—"

"Divorces?" The single word was accompanied by a faint lifting of Daniel's eyebrows.

"She was married, too," Lee explained. "You will understand better when you talk to Savina. We are not young feather-heads, Daniel; this is serious, 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 situation, I couldn't—all the idiotic tourists hanging about! Well, here we are, or here I am, and Savina is upstairs, most anxious to meet you."

"Certainly," Daniel Randon agreed. He was silent for a moment in the consideration of what he had been told. Then, "I can't have you on the batey," he pronounced. He lifted a silencing hand against an anger forming in instant unmeasured speech. "Not for myself," he particularized. "You could have seven mistresses, of all colors, if the place were mine. Please remember that it isn't. It's the company's. That is quite different." Daniel 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 remember that I have a photograph of Fanny with the children: it is much admired, well known. I couldn't explain your Mrs.—Mrs. Grove. Who could? We haven't a sister. Altogether I am sorry." He stopped uncompromisingly; yet, Lee recognized, in all that Daniel had said there was no word of criticism or gratuitous advice. He had voiced the facts only as they related to him; to everything else he gave the effect of a massive blankness.

* * * * *

Argument, Lee saw, was useless. Extended to the heart of a tropical island, the virtuous indignations of a hard propriety still bound their movements. "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 for me to see you. Camagey is nearer, but gossip there would have you in the same bed no matter how far apart your rooms were. Decidedly not Camagey."

There was no train for Havana, it developed, before tomorrow. "And, in the meanwhile," Lee inquired, "must we stay here? Savina will be miserable."

"Why not?" Daniel gazed about casually. "I lived with Venalez a month. It is good enough if you are not too strict about a travelling beauty or two who may be stopping as well." 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 party of directors, or a special mission, there were no guests. At his, Daniel's central, in Santa Clara on the sea, he hoped some day to offer them the hospitality of his own house.

When he left, Lee made no revelation of what had been said downstairs; Savina accepted the situation as it had been exposed to her. "I can't allow myself to think of a night here," she told him; "it will be a horror." She opened the slats of the long window shutters, and glowing bars 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 as though they must shine uninterruptedly through her body. Lee considered the advisability of taking her for a walk—there were, he had seen from the train, no roads here for driving—but, recalling the insolent staring and remarks she had met, he was forced to drop that possibility.

Weary from the prolonged wakefulness of the night, Savina made an effort to sleep; and, waiting until she was measurably quiet, Lee went out. The heat was blinding, it walled him in, pressed upon him with a feeling of suffocation, as though—between him and the freshness, the salvation, of any air—there 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 empty, the windows without sashes, were women, scantily covered, sounding every note in a scale from black to white. Yet, Lee observed, the whitest were, essentially, black. What amazed, disturbed, him was their indolent blinking indifference, their indecent imperviousness, in the full blaze of day.

They were, to Lee, significant, because from them he drew a knowledge of Cobra. He could not, without such assistance, have arrived at the instinctive understanding that interpreted the street into which he turned. It was the street of a delirium, running, perhaps, for half a mile; an irregular deeply rutted way formed by its double row of small unsubstantial buildings of raw or gaudily 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 cafs, restaurants, there was still an incredible number of banks—mere shells with flat tarred roofs and high counters built from wall to wall. The receivers, the paying tellers, were many, with the mingled bloods, the heterogeneous characteristics, of China and Colonial Spain and Africa; and, back of their activity— there was a constant rush of deposited money and semi-confidential discussion—were safes so ponderous and ancient that they might have contained the treasure of a plate fleet of Peru.

Crowding in on them, challenging each other from opposite sides, the restaurants were longer and shallow, with their groups of tables ranged against walls decorated in appallingly primitive and savage designs: palms like crawling spiders of verdigris set on columns of chocolate rose from shores, 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 and drank, with thick lips, liquors of vicious dyes. The prodigious women, often paler than the men, drinking with them, gabbled in a loud and corrupt Spanish and, without hats on their sere crinkled masses of hair, were unrestrained in displays of calculated or emotionally demented excitement.

A flat wagon passed, holding, on precarious chairs, a band furiously playing an infernal jumbled music which, as it swelled, filled all the occupants of the cafs with a twitching hysteria. Subdued masculine shouts were pierced 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 glowing with a subcutaneous redness, thronged the sidewalks; and sharp-jawed men, with a burned indeterminate superiority of race, riding emaciated horses, added to the steel of their machetes revolvers strapped on their long thighs.

What, mainly, occupied Lee Randon was the nakedness of the passion everywhere surcharging the surface of life. There was, in the sense familiar to him, no restraint, no cover beyond the casual screens at the backs of the restaurants; no accident to which the uncertain material of life was subject was improbable; murder rasped, like the finger 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 duty typified by Fanny left such a morass as he saw about him? Was he, Lee Randon, instead of advancing, falling back into a past more remote than coherent speech? Nothing, he asserted, could be further from his intention and hope. Yet, without doubt, he was surrounded by the denial of order, of disciplined feeling; and, flatly, it terrified him.

Lee insisted, hastily, that what he wanted—no, demanded—was not this destruction of responsibility, a chaos, mentally and sensually, but the removal of it as a rigid mob imposition on the higher discretion of his individuality. The thing which, with Savina, he had assaulted was, in its way, as unfortunate as the 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 to the flesh and the waste of a negation with neither courage nor rapture. Damn it, couldn't he be freed from one without falling into the other? Lee told himself that it must be possible to leave permanently the fenced roads of Eastlake for the high hills; it wasn't necessary to go down into the bottoms, the mire.

He regarded himself curiously as, to a large extent, the result of all the ages that had multiplied since the heated tropics held the early fecundity of human life. A Haitian lunged by with out-turned palms hanging at his knees, a loose jaw dropped on a livid gullet flecked with white, and a sultry inner consciousness no more than a germinal superstition visible in fixed blood—suffused eyes. He had an odor, Lee fantastically thought, of stale mud. Well—there he was and there was Lee Randon, and the difference between them was the sum of almost countless centuries of religions 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 partly solid and partly composed of ignited gases revolving in an infinity of time and space. He was aware of sensations, flavors, champagnes, more delicate than the brutality of a rape conceived in strangling gulps of sugar cane rum. On the outside he had been bleached, deodorized, made conformable with chairs rather than allowed to retain the proportions, powers, designed for the comfortable holding to branches. But in his heart, in what he thought of as his spirit, what had he gained, where— further than being temporarily with Savina in the beastly hotel of Cobra—was he?

* * * * *

His thoughts had become so inappropriate to his purpose, his presence, here that he banished them and returned to Savina. She was notably more cheerful than when he had left her, and was engaged with an omelet, rough bread, Scotch preserved strawberries, and a bottle of Marquis de Riscal; most of which, she told him, had been sent, together with other pleasant things, by Daniel Randon. She was unusually seductive in appearance, with, over the sheer embroidered beauty of her underclothes, her graceful 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 Brazil. I have an idea we won't stay there long, either, but travel on toward the East. I do like islands, and there are quantities, quarts, to see in the Pacific." She put her arms, from which the wide sleeves fell back, around his neck, drew him close to her. "It doesn't matter where I am, if it is with you. I love you, Lee, and I am happy because I know we'll always have each other. We are not so very young, you see, and there isn't a great deal of time left, not enough to grow tired, to change in.