“We’re six thousand miles away—in the other half of the globe, and they can’t visualize our problems. They don’t understand that they must hold this thing off far a while. The whole course of history will be changed. Oh, if they could have one ‘look see’ into the Pavilion, Julie! or one glimpse at the holy foundations of the new Asia! I tell you I can’t bear to see this project cut adrift in the universe alone. Ah, well, I’ll be going to China soon, and I promise you I’ll raise every foot of its ancient dust.”
Julie adored Barry in his spurts of white wrath, but he was wretched now as well as angry.
“Cleopatra’s barge will not stay afloat. It will sink with its Eurasian captains in Eastern seas!” Julie prophesied.
He glanced up quickly. “Isabel!” he muttered. “She must be in a fine frame of mind. Perhaps the grandiose title we gave her may yet come true. Republics over here will be sadly unsteady things. A strong hand can too easily twist them into the one-man power the East understands. It’s the effect on China I fear the most. She was drawing life and encouragement from this experiment, and just at the crucial moment the whole thing with its far reaching results, is about to topple into dust!
“The day is near,” he told her, “when we must pick tip our packs and move on.”
Julie tried to realize it, tried to plan toward such an eventuality, but a spiritual as well as a physical inertia enveloped her like a super-added sheath of being. She exerted herself to the utmost to hide this new condition from his observation for she knew in what a desperate struggle he was engaged for the life of the New East. More than any personal emotion that could ever seize him, she believed, this passion gripped his heart. And for one who had achieved nothing in this issue, who had actually been flung out of all its purposes, no legitimate appeal remained. Her dazed being still responded acutely to all his problems—but the greatest of them all had left an agony in her soul.
Once he looked at her very troubled. “What’s the matter, Julie?” he begged.
And Julie seeing that in that moment he had forgotten everything but her, grew frightened in spite of her exultation.
“Oh, it’s just the effects of the sunstroke!” she exclaimed, drawing herself defensively up.
“I’ll take you to see Braithwaite,” he said. But he was summoned away on another of his critical errands, and the visit to Dr. Braithwaite did not take place.