Charles, at the heart of this, stood enveloped, surrounded, by a drama like the sharp clash of cymbals. It was easy to be overwhelmed, strangled, blinded, by the savage color; briefly to be obliterated. That possibility had been, lately, very much in his mind; and he wondered, against all his recent change, if, in the surrender of his idealism, he had lost his amulet, his safety. While he had, to a large extent, solved, for himself, the philosophy of conduct, cleared the motives of his acts, a great deal was inexplicable still. He saw, dimly, that there could be little hope of justice on any island except as the projection, the replica, of a fundamental universal integrity of justice. Perfection like that couldn't begin on the rim of being and extend inward; it must be at the center of all life, obscured, delayed, but, in an end not computable in the span of human existence, certain and inevitable. Charles Abbott now had the feeling that, parallel with the maintaining of his grasp on materialism, his recognition of the means at his hand, there should be an allegiance to a supremacy of the immeasurable whole.
That double vision, the acceptance of a general good together with the possibility of extreme ill to the individual, puzzled him. He was required to put faith in a power seemingly indifferent to him, to discharge a responsibility in return for which nothing that he could weigh was promised. Charles recalled what had overtaken the dancer, La Clavel, in payment for a heroic effort against an insupportable oppression. Disaster had met the body, the flesh; what occurred in the spirit he was unable to grasp; but this, suddenly, breathlessly, he saw:
La Clavel's bitter defiance, her mountain-born hatred of oppression, her beaten but undefiled body, had communicated to him something of her own valor. It was as though she had given him a palm, a shielded flame, to add to his own fortitude. In all probability she would, soon, be dead; Charles correctly gauged the Spanish animosity; and yet she was alive, strong, in him. She would be living; it was Ceaza y Santacilla who had died, been vanquished; his abnormal refinement dropping so easily into the bestial, the measure of evil, in him, for which he stood, had been slain, dissipated, ended. The shawl contracted, became a thing magnificent but silk, a mantón invested with a significance brave and surprisingly tender. It was, now, the standard of La Clavel, the mantle of the saintliness he had proclaimed. His doubts, his questioning, were resolved into the conviction that the act of the dancer was her spirit made visible, created tangibly for a tangible purpose, and that, there, she was indestructible.