“At one time I had enjoyed them, I couldn't have thought of more splendid things; but the spirit of that period was not the same, and it was the spirit which made them desirable. I suppose that could be called my love for Fanny. I was glad to sit and discuss the hem of her skirt with her. It was enough just to be coming home to the house where she was waiting. I tell you, Daniel, my life then was transfigured. How long did it last--four years, six, eight? I can't be exact; but if I speak of its duration you will guess that it went. It went slowly, so slowly that for a long while I was ignorant of what was happening. It left in the vanishing of the little lubrications you insist are as needful for society as for your machinery. They began as lubrications, evasions, to keep the wheels turning smoothly, and they ended as grains of sand in the bearings. “First there was Fanny's convention of modesty--it had been put into her before birth--which amounted to the secret idea that the reality of love was disgusting. She could endure it only when feeling swept her from her essential being. When that had passed she gathered her decency around her like Susanna surprised. Positively she had the look of a temporary betrayal. So that, you see, was hidden in a cloak of hypocrisy. Then she had the impracticable conviction that I existed solely in her, that she was a prism through which every feeling and thought I had must be deflected. Fanny didn't express this openly, it had too silly a sound, but underneath, savagely, she fought and schemed and lied--more conventions--for it. And, when the children were born, she was ready for them with such a mountain of pretty gestures and ideas that I gave them up: I couldn't fight their mother and the nurses and the maids in the kitchen--the whole bloody nice world. For one thing I wasn't home enough; when I got in for dinner they were either in bed or starched for their curtesies and kisses. They are superior children, Daniel; yet what they were taught to say sounds like the infantile sentimentalities of the stage.” * * * * * The capataz of the batey gang, a tall flushed Jamaican negro, passed on a cantering white pony. The American wives, the flowers of Utica and Ohio, went by in light afternoon dresses, one propelling a baby in a cart. The Field Superintendent, lank and sun-dark under a green palmetto hat, wearing a grotesquely large revolver, saluted Daniel from the open. “Trouble at the cantina barracon,” he called cheerfully. “It was then,” Lee specified, “that all my loose ends were gathered up in Cytherea. I have, I think, explained her. She was a doll, but it is more useful, now, to picture her as a principle. I didn't realize that at first: I took her to be an individual, the image of a happy personal fate that, somehow, I had missed, but might still catch up with.