ou must realize, is
selfish; it would be selfish to take you on a steamer, for myself, and
go north. If I did that, if I forgot what I have sworn, I'd die. I
should seem to the world to be alive, and I'd walk about and talk and
go into the city on some business or other; but, in reality, I should
be as dead as dust.

"There are men like that everywhere, Narcisa, perhaps the most of life
is made up of them. They look all right and are generally respected;
yet, at some time or other, they killed themselves, they avoided what
they should have met, tried to save something not worth a thought. I
don't doubt a lot never find it out, they think they are as good as
ever--they don't remember how they once felt. But others discover it,
or the people who love them discover it for them. And that would
happen to me, to us."

In reply to all this she whispered that she loved him. Her arm slipped
up across his shoulder and the tips of her fingers touched his left
cheek. A momentary dizziness enveloped him at her immeasurable
sweetness: it might be that she was a part of what he was to find, to
do, in Cuba; and then his emotion perished in the bareness of his
heart to physical passion. Its place was taken by a deep pride in his
aloofness from the flesh; that alone, he felt, dignified him, set him
above the mischances of self-betrayal.

Charles Abbott kissed her softly and then took her hands. "You
wouldn't want me, Narcisa," he continued; "if I failed in this, I
should fail you absolutely. If I were unfaithful now I could never be
faithful to you."

She drew her hands sharply away. "It's you who are young and not I,"
she declared; "you talk like a boy, like Andres. All you want is a
kind of glory, like the gold lace the officers of Isabella wear.
Nothing could be more selfish."

"You don't understand," he replied patiently.

Narcisa, he felt, could never grasp what was such a profound part of
his masculine necessity. Abstractions, the liberty, for example, of an
alien people, would have little weight against her instinct for the
realities in her own heart. Her emotion was tangible, compared with
his it was deeply reasonable; it moved in the direction of their
immediate good, of the happiness, the fullness, of their beings; while
all his desire, his hope, was cloudy, of the sky. In the high silver
radiance of his idealism, the warmer green of earth, the promise of
Narcisa's delicate charm, the young desire in his blood, were, he