sistence, sure of reward, to fight their way
to this spark and reveal it to the gaze of astonished and flattered
humanity. Rezanov's very arrogance had led him to regard the mass of
mankind as but one degree removed from the nursery; his good nature and
philosophical spirit to treat them with an indulgence that kept
sourness out of his cynicism and inevitably recurring weariness and
disgust; his ardent imagination had consoled itself with the vision of
a future when man should live in a world made reasonable by the triumph
of ideals that now lurked half ashamed in the high spaces of the human
mind.

He looked back in wonder at the moment of wild regret and protest--the
bitterer in its silence--when they had told him he must die; when in
the last rally of the vital forces he had believed his will was still
strong enough to command his ravaged body, to propel his brain, still
teeming with a vast and complicated future, his heart, still warm and
insistent with the image it cherished, on to the ultimates of ambition
and love. How brief it had been, that last cry of mortality, with its
accompaniment of furious wonder at his unseemly and senseless cutting
off. In the adjustment and readjustment of political and natural
forces the world ambled on philosophically, fulfilling its inevitable
destiny.

If he had not been beyond humor, he would have smiled at the idea that
in the face of all eternity it mattered what nation on one little
planet eventually possessed a fragment called California. To him that
fair land was empty and purposeless save for one figure, and even of
her he thought with the terrible calm of dissolution. During these
last months of illness and isolation he had been less lonely than at
any time of his life save during those few weeks in California, for he
had lived with her incessantly in spirit; and in that subtle
imaginative communion had pressed close to a profound and complex soul,
revealed before only in flashes to a vision astray in the confusion of
the senses. He had felt that her response to his passion was far more
vital and enduring than dwelt in the capacity of most women; he had
appreciated her gifts of mind, her piquant variousness that scotched
monotony, the admirable characteristics that would give a man repose
and content in his leisure, and subtly advance his career. But in
those long reveries, at the head of his forlorn caravan or in the
desolate months of convalescence, he had arriv