And, when the children were born,
she was ready for them with such a mountain of pretty gestures and
ideas that I gave them up: I couldn't fight their mother and the nurses
and the maids in the kitchen--the whole bloody nice world. For one
thing I wasn't home enough; when I got in for dinner they were either
in bed or starched for their curtesies and kisses. They are superior
children, Daniel; yet what they were taught to say sounds like the
infantile sentimentalities of the stage."
* * * * *
The capataz of the batey gang, a tall flushed Jamaican negro, passed on
a cantering white pony. The American wives, the flowers of Utica and
Ohio, went by in light afternoon dresses, one propelling a baby in a
cart. The Field Superintendent, lank and sun-dark under a green
palmetto hat, wearing a grotesquely large revolver, saluted Daniel from
the open. "Trouble at the cantina barracon," he called cheerfully.
"It was then," Lee specified, "that all my loose ends were gathered up
in Cytherea. I have, I think, explained her. She was a doll, but it is
more useful, now, to picture her as a principle. I didn't realize that
at first: I took her to be an individual, the image of a happy personal
fate that, somehow, I had missed, but might still catch up with.
"The wildest kind of a dream," Lee Randon proclaimed. "But when I
became aware of Savina, or rather of her passion, I was sure I had been
completely justified.
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