Either it
was impossible for Fanny to leave the children, the house, or the
servants, or Lee's affairs were in need of close supervision.
Suddenly it annoyed him to discuss again, uselessly, Camag?ey; it had
become only a vain pretence, a sustained mirage, of escape from
disagreeable days. While it was hot in Cuba, Daniel maintained, the
trade wind coming with evening made the nights cool; it was far more
comfortable, summer and winter, at La Quinta than in Eastlake. Cuba, he
made it seem, Havana and the colonias of cane, the coast and the
interior, was a place with none of the drawbacks of a northern land or
society; there were, certainly, conventions--the Spanish were a very
punctilious people--but they operated in a conveniently definite,
Daniel might almost say a sensible masculine, manner. He had not gone
into any further detail, but had sunk into his celebrated immobility of
expression. Lee, therefore, had drawn his own, natural, conclusions; he
had come to regard Cuba in the same light as that of the early
Castilian adventurers--an El Dorado, but of freedom rather than gold.
A perverse restlessness settled upon him, and he put down his coffee
cup abruptly; the contentment in his surroundings vanished. Lee wanted
to be somewhere else, see something different, not so--so tranquil, so
complacently delivered to the uneventful. Fanny, he told himself
resentfully, would be satisfied to sit exactly where she was for a
year.
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