Julie colored angrily. “I’ve seen for a long time that you don’t like me, but I find no justification for an insult!”
Chad’s tone changed. “I am not trying to do that. It isn’t that I dislike you—but that I wish you hadn’t happened.” A tense earnestness broke out on his harassed face. “How can I make you understand about Barry! What is it that fills the atmosphere here? What do you feel in the air?”
“Belief—burning belief in the work,” Julie dejectedly replied.
“Yes, but mixed up with it, as there is mixed up in every high impulse in man, you find the darker strain. Read the mood of this place, and in it you will find expectation—human expectation, everywhere high. Look at Isabel, for its greatest extravagance!”
“Yes,” Julie agreed, “she looks and talks as if she lived in the greatest expectation of an extraordinary climax for herself.”
“And that’s what in differing degrees they all expect. The high, clear strain is working for the cause, and working hard, but the dark strain is using this place as a training ground for personal power. Take those people you met the other night at Isabel’s: Holborne—he’s a prime fighter, but do you think he’ll not desert the field when some other background offers to set Holborne off to better advantage? And Leah Chamberlain—what but a play-ground of the passions is this to her? And to Ellis Wilbur, what but a rough struggle that she won’t engage in, for fear of getting hurt? I could name you a lot of others to illustrate how this priceless and incorporeal endeavor, this Republic of the Sun—which is a movement to take hold of the heart of the East, and not a South African or Klondike gold-fields rush serves solely for the aggrandizement of human personalities.”
He paused, and looked at her keenly. “So when you see one simple, splendid exception, you’ve just got to hang on to it by your teeth! Outside of Father Hull, there is just one person in this whole Archipelago who has sought nothing, absolutely nothing for himself. He has never had a ruling prince’s job, though the Government has often to go and get him when it’s in a pinch. Though he’s the best known man in the Islands, he’s never dreamed of making himself into a political power— He’s just the ‘Mayor of Manila’—a wholly make-believe title, since there’s no such thing; but I know of no personality that by scattering itself freely has come into such an accruement of power.
“That’s what sets him apart. That’s what through all contingencies will cause him to survive—because neither fate nor God can get along without an agency like that.”
To hide her emotion Julie looked out into the dusk. Again Nahal, with all its eternal futility, arose like a bar to the universe. In vain she tried to push the vision off her horizon: there, she knew, it would stand always as the total of her spirit’s achievement.
Chad went on, but with less assurance now. “I have heard that there is—that there might be another factor in this thing. Perhaps it could happily be made the determining one. I refer to—the other man. Couldn’t he be hurried along? This is absolutely his moment. I offer you my assistance in every way, to make it clear to him that this is the time to step in.”