a ferment in it could have nourished and shaped that long and narrow
face, those thin lips, lean cheeks, and the small, sharp eyes. The
thatch of hair, dust-coloured, straight and sparse, advertised the
niggard soil, as did the nose, thin, delicately modelled, and just
hinting the suggestion of a beak. His meagre blood had denied him
much of life, and permitted him to be an extremist in one thing
only, which thing was righteousness. Over right conduct he pondered
and agonized, and that he should do right was as necessary to his
nature as loving and being loved were necessary to commoner clay.

He was sitting under the algaroba trees between the lanai and the
beach. His eyes wandered over the dancers and he turned his head
away and gazed seaward across the mellow-sounding surf to the
Southern Cross burning low on the horizon. He was irritated by the
bare shoulders and arms of the women. If he had a daughter he would
never permit it, never. But his hypothesis was the sheerest
abstraction. The thought process had been accompanied by no inner
vision of that daughter. He did not see a daughter with arms and
shoulders. Instead, he smiled at the remote contingency of
marriage. He was thirty-five, and, having had no personal
experience of love, he looked upon it, not as mythical, but as
bestial. Anybody could marry. The Japanese and Chinese coolies,
toiling on the sugar plantations and in the rice-fields, married.
They invariably married at the first opportunity. It was because
they were so low in the scale of life. There was nothing else for
them to do. They were like the army men and women. But for him
there were other and higher things. He was different from them--
from all of them. He was proud of how he happened to be. He had
come of no petty love-match. He had come of lofty conception of
duty and of devotion to a cause. His father had not married for