"Wait," Charles Abbott replied with a touch of impatience; "you are quite safe, there is no tide at present." Floating in the calm immensity, his arms outspread, his face, at once burned by the sun and lapped by water, turned to the opposed azure above, he drew in accession after accession of a determination like peace. Nothing should upset what he had planned. There was a stir beside him--Andre Escobar was returning to the shore, and lazily, thoughtfully, he swam back. The Cuban left immediately, for breakfast; but Charles lingered in the pool, lounging upon the wooden grilling with a cigarette. One by one the bathers went away. The sky, the sea, were a blaze of blue. The clatter of hoofs, the caleseros' departing cries, sounded from the Paseo. "Charles Abbott," he repeated his own name aloud with an accent of surprise. What, whom, did it describe? He gazed down over his drying body. This, then, was he--the two legs, thin but sufficiently muscular, the trunk in a swimming suit, the arms and hands! His hidden brain, his invisible mind, was himself as well; and, of the two, the mind and the body, the unseen was overwhelmingly the more important. He remembered how, fencing with de Vaca, the body had failed him utterly; de Vaca, attacking his will, was contemptuous of the other ... and his will had survived. Rising, he felt that he commanded himself absolutely; he had no sympathy, no patience, for frailty, for a failure through the celebrated weaknesses of humanity: hardness was the indispensable trait of success. * * * * * The whole of reasonably intelligent life, Charles discovered, was disrupted by the ceaseless clash of two utterly opposed ideas, emotions. There was, first, the need in the individual to serve, to justify, himself, to maintain his integrity; and, as well, there was the duty--at least, it was universally called a duty--of a self-sacrifice for love. The failures of superior men came largely, he was certain, in the breaking down of the first through the second. A man, for example, put into motion the accomplishment of his own demand, and then was appalled by the incidental price, but more to others than to himself. Yes, love betrayed men. The Escobars were, inseparably, Cuba, they were happily merged, lost, in one supreme cause; yet the superiority of their hearts over the head endangered their dearest preoccupation. They saw symbols as realities, they wrongly valued emotion more highly than reasoning.