However, he had had very little opportunity to talk to his brother: the
difficulties, in Cobra and Havana, of shipping Savina's body back to
New York--William Grove, persuaded that it was unnecessary, hadn't come
to Cuba; a fire in one of the out-lying colonias of the La Quinta
estate, that had destroyed three caballerias of ratoon; the sheer
tyranny of an intricate process which, for seven months in the year,
was not allowed to pause, had kept Lee from any satisfactory
communication of his feelings or convictions. But, at last, returning
hot and fatigued from the clearing, by fire, of a tumba, Daniel had
been sitting with him for more than an hour, and he showed no signs of
immediate change or activity.
"What you say is clear enough," Lee Randon admitted; "and yet--but I
can't see where--there is a sophistry in it." Daniel made a gesture
both curt and indifferent. "I tell you it would be better, even at the
destruction of the entire present world, to establish honesty. Since
you have referred to me--what we, Savina and I, did was, simply,
honest; but, again as you pointed out, its effect around us, for bad or
very possibly good, was brought to nothing by the way it was drawn back
into the victorious conspiring of sham. Even I don't know which,
commendable or fatal, it was; I haven't been able to find out; I hadn't
time. But Savina preferred the two weeks we had together to an infinity
of the other.
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