ut not, even in the peculiarly
brutal circumstances of his transition, sharply; only now Charles
Abbott definitely realized that he had left in Cuba, lost there, the
illusions which were synonymous with his young intensity.

After that nothing much had absorbed him, very little had happened. In
comparison with the spectacular brilliancy of his beginning, the
remainder of life had seemed level if not actually drab. Certainly the
land to which he had returned was dull against the vivid south, the
tropics. But he couldn't go back to Havana, he had felt, even after
the Spanish Government was expelled, any more than he could find in
the Plaza de Armas his own earlier self. The whole desirable affair
had been one--the figures of his loves and detestations, the paseos
and glorietas and parques of the city, now, he had heard, so changed,
formed a unity destroyed by the missing of any single element.

He wasn't, though, specially considering himself, but rather the
sustaining beliefs that so clearly marked the divergence between
Howard's day and his own. This discovery, he felt, was of deep
importance, it explained so much that was apparently inexplicable.
Charles Abbott asserted silently, dogmatically, that a failure of
spirit had occurred ... there was no longer such supreme honor as
Andres Escobar's. The dance measure in the Spanish Rhapsody grew
louder and more insistent, and through it he heard the castanets of
La Clavel, he saw the superb flame of her body in the brutal
magnificence of the fringed manton like Andalusia incarnate.

* * * * *

He had a vision of the shawl itself, and, once more, seemed to feel
the smooth dragging heaviness of its embroidery. The burning square of
its colors unfolded before him, the incredible magentas, the night
blues and oranges and emerald and vermilion, worked into broad peonies
and roses wreathed in leaves. And suddenly he felt again that, not
only prefiguring Spain, it was symbolical of the youth, the time, that
had gone. Thus the past appeared to him, wrapped bright and precious
in the shawl of memory.

No woman that Howard Gage might dream of could have worn La Clavel's
manton; it would have consumed her like a breath of fire, leaving a
white ash hardly more than distinguishable from the present living
actuality. Women cast up a prodigious amount of smoke now, a most
noisy crackling, but Charles Abbott doubted the blaze within them.
Water had been