Charles Abbott's thoughts returned continually to Andres; in the shadowy region of his brain the latter was like a vividly and singly illuminated figure. He remembered, too, the occasion of his first seeing Andres, at the Hotel Inglaterra: they had gone together into the restaurant, where, over rum punches and cigars, the love he had for him had been born at once. It was curious--that feeling; a thing wholly immaterial, idealizing. He had speculated about it before, but without coming to the end of its possibilities, the bottom of its meaning. There was no need to search for a reason for the love of women; that, it might be, was no more than mechanical, the allurement cast by nature about its automatic purpose. It belonged to earth, where it touched any sky was not Charles' concern; but his friendship for Andres Escobar had no relation to material ends. At first it had been upheld, vitalized, by admiration, qualities perceptible to his mind, to analysis; he had often reviewed them--Andres' deep sense of honor, his allegiance to a conduct free of self, his generosity, his slightly dramatic but inflexible courage, the fastidious manners of his person. His clothes, the sprig of mimosa he preferred, the angle of his hat and the rake back, through an elbow, of his malacca cane, were all satisfying, distinguished. But Charles' consciousness of these actual traits, details, had vanished before an acceptance of Andres as a whole, uncritically. What, once, had been a process of thought had become an emotion integral with his own subconscious being. Something of his essential character had entered Andres, and a part of Andres had become bound into him. This, as soon as she had grown into the slightest menace to it, had cast Pilar de Lima from his consideration. It had been no effort, at the moment necessary he had forgotten her; just as Andres, faced with the truth, would put her away from him. The bond between them, Charles told himself, was forged from pure gold. This was running through his head on the night of the danzon. He was seated at the entrance of the United States Club, where the sharp Yankee accents of the gamblers within floated out and were lost in the narrow walled darkness of Virtudes Street. It was no more than eleven, the Tacon Theatre would be empty yet.... Charles had no intention of going to the danzon, but at the same time he was the victim of a restless curiosity in connection with it; he had an uncomfortable oppression at the vision of Andres, with Pilar in the bright shawl, on the floor crowded with the especial depravities of Havana.