rabness
of life had caught him from which he could perceive no escape. Not, he
was bound to add, that he had actively looked for one. No, his
participation in further events had been interfered with by a doubt,
his life had been drawn into an endless question. If he had walked
steadily past Andres Escobar, left him to a murder which, after all,
he, Charles Abbott, had been powerless to stop, would he have gone on
to the triumph of his ideal?

In addition to this there was the eternal speculation over the
relation, in human destiny, of the heart to the head--which, in the
end, would, must, triumph? There was no necessity in his final
philosophy for the optimism, where men are concerned, that had been
his first stay. He wasn't so sure now--but was he certain of
anything?--of the coming victory of right, of the spreading, from land
to land, of freedom. Did life reach upward or down, or was it merely
the circling of a carrousel, the whirling of the danzon? Nothing, for
him, could be settled, definite. He was inclined to the belief that
the blow of the scabbard on his head.... That, however, like the rest,
was indeterminate. He came back eternally to the same query--had he,
as for so long, so wearily, he had insisted to himself, failed, proved
weak for the contentions of existence on a positive plane? Had he
become a part, a member, of the nameless, the individually impotent,
throng? His sympathies were, by birth, aristocratic rather than
humane; he preferred strength to acquiescence; but there were times
now, perhaps, when he was aging, when there was a relief in sinking
into the sea of humility.

Then his thoughts centered again on Howard Gage; who, before leaving
that afternoon, had unpleasantly impressed Charles Abbott by his
inelasticity, the fixity of his gaze upon the ground. Howard had been
involved in a war of a magnitude that swamped every vestige of the
long-sustained Cuban struggle. And he admitted his relation to this
had been one of bitter necessity:

"I had to go, we all did," Howard Gage had said. "There wasn't any
music about it, any romance. It had to be done, that was all, and it
was. Don't expect me to be poetic."

Yes, the youth of today were, to Charles' way of thinking, badly off.
Anyone who could not be poetic, who wouldn't be if he had the chance,
was unfortunate, limited, cramped. Visions, ideals, were indispensable
for youth. Why, damn it, love was dependent on dreams, unreality. He
had never