Better it should be nothing. Yes, far better, instinct told him that.
Miss Howland had come into his existence, radiant, pure, beautiful, and
so utterly feminine; as a meteor flashing across the night pauses for a
brief instant in the sky before shivering to nothingness. This simile
occurred to Dan, who, though no poet, was at least a sailor and as such a
student of the heavenly bodies. Yes, a meteor which had illumined his
life.
He had never permitted himself to think in this way before. It is
doubtful if before to-night he could have felt as he now did. It had all
come over him suddenly with a rush. When he talked with her at the hotel
in San Blanco he was filled with thoughts of his future, and assumed as
granted his footing upon her plane. How absurd, how ridiculous this
seemed now!
Why, why was it, he asked himself, that society or convention or whatever
it was had drawn the grim _chevaux de frise_ between those who had
accomplished, or whose forebears had accomplished for them, and those who
were yet to accomplish; with hosts eager to applaud the achievements of
finality, but who had no adequate encouragement for those who had yet to
achieve their mission, who fought their battles in the dark and won them
in the glorious light, or losing, sank back into that oblivion out of
which they had striven to emerge?
If fate had been different--yet if fate had been different he would never
have seen her, perhaps.
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