ion that transcended reason and took
flight into the realm of overmastering emotion--the only overmastering
emotion, by the way, that he had ever experienced.

His choice, therefore, was in itself a loss of control and a dangerous
one, for nothing is more perilous to sanity than the certainty that
most other people in the world are wrong. Such conviction leads to a
Jesuitical contempt of means; in cases where the Puritan shell has
grown to be impregnable from the outside it sets up an internal
ferment which sometimes bursts shell and man and all into disastrous
fragments. Until old age kills them, the passions and emotions never
die in man; suppress them how we will, we can never ignore them; they
rise again to mock us when we think we are done with them forever. And
the man of Simpson's type suffers from them most of all, for he dams
against them all normal channels of expression.

Simpson, standing at the pier-end, was suffering from them now. His
exaltation--a thing of a moment, as his fervour had been--had gone out
of him, leaving him limp, uncertain of his own powers, of his own
calling, even--the prey to the discouragement that precedes action,
which is the deepest discouragement of all. Except for himself and
Witherbee the pier was deserted; behind him the filthy town slept in
its filth. Four buzzards wheeled above it, gorged and slow; the
harbour lay before him like a green mirror, so still that the ship was
reflected in it down to the last rope-yarn. Over all, the sun,
colourless and furnace-hot, burned in a sky of steel. There was
insolence in the scorched slopes that shouldered up from the bay, a
threatening permanence in the saw-edged sky-line. The indifference of
it all, its rock-ribbed impenetrability to human influence, laid a
crushing weight on Simpson's soul, so that he almost sank to his knees
in sheer oppression of spirit.

"Do you know much about Hayti?" asked Witherbee, coming up behind him.

"As much as I could learn from books." Simpson wanted to be angry at
the consul--why he could not tell--but Witherbee's voice was so
carefully courteous that he yielded perforce to its persuasion and
swung around, facing him. Suddenly, because he was measuring himself
against man and not against Nature, his weakness left him, and
confidence in himself and his mission flooded back upon him. "As much
as I could get from books." He paused. "You have lived here long?"

"Long enough," Witherbee answered. "Five