“Resurrect the other man!” he hazarded desperately. “Barry shan’t be caught in this undertow! I’ve prayed like a Parsee that he would keep out!”
At that moment Barry and Julie appeared in the doorway. The two gazed at them, wondering.
“I’m going to drive Miss Dreschell home!” Chad suddenly announced. “She never takes the trouble to talk to me, so I, am going to seize this chance.”
As they drove together through the twilight, it became clear to Julie that Chad had set himself to some psychological investigation. She was aware that in floating into his circle of life, she had aroused in him some inexplicable distrust.
What he managed to evolve after a bit was that in order that Barry should meet the peculiar hazards of his career, it was expedient for him to remain single-hearted. Ellis Wilbur, Julie recalled, amid her contending emotions, had said exactly the same thing. Was everybody in the East a self-appointed guardian over Barry’s emotions? It gave her a feeling of being floated persistently away from his existence.
No, Barry must not be carried under by the current of stressful emotions, as Chad painfully intimated he himself had been. He contrived to make clear that what he chiefly resented in Julie was a certain disturbingly inefficacious flame of being, which he took occasion to compare to a light-house open to the winds of the seas.
He did not deny, now that she was under observation, the starry quality of her substance, but he regarded it as nothing more than an accident of soul. Nothing ever would come from it, and Barry, he pointed out, would be led astray by it, would follow in its futile trail, a blind lopped-off scrap of the sun.
“After a while,” he continued, with the same extraordinary frankness, “after you’ve dipped a finger in the pie, you will go right back to the doing of endlessly inconsequential things and Barry, perhaps you know, is committed to going on.” Julie understood that he referred to Barry’s secret activities outside the islands.
She regarded him gloomily. “I think you are perfectly right in assuming that nothing I shall ever do will bear fruit. Once I tried to pull the fire down out of the skies to light a few little clods of earth, but the creatures only thought it was to burn them up.”
“I think you will find that you pulled down that fire to make a halo for your own head. For all your hallowed way, you came into the East hunting tremendous things for yourself.”