Percival Ford¹ wondered why he had come.  He did not dance.  He did not care much for army people.  Yet he knew them all—gliding² and revolving³ there on the broad lanai of the Seaside, the officers in their fresh-starched uniforms of white, the civilians⁴ in white and black, and the women bare of shoulders and arms.  After two years in Honolulu the Twentieth was departing to its new station in Alaska, and Percival Ford, as one of the big men of the Islands, could not help knowing the officers and their women.  
But between knowing and liking⁵ was a vast gulf⁶.  The army women frightened him just a little.  They were in ways quite different from the women he liked best—the elderly women, the spinsters and the bespectacled maidens⁷, and the very serious women of all ages whom he met on church and library and kindergarten committees, who came meekly⁸ to him for contributions and advice.  He ruled those women by virtue⁹ of his superior mentality¹⁰, his great wealth, and the high place he occupied in the commercial baronage of Hawaii.  And he was not afraid of them in the least.  Sex, with them, was not obtrusive¹¹.  Yes, that was it.  There was in them something else, or more, than the assertive¹² grossness of life.  He was fastidious; he acknowledged that to himself; and these army women, with their bare shoulders and naked arms, their straight-looking eyes, their vitality¹³ and challenging femaleness, jarred upon his sensibilities.
 
Nor did he get on better with the army men, who took life lightly, drinking and smoking and swearing their way through life and asserting the essential grossness of flesh no less shamelessly than their women.  He was always uncomfortable in the company of the army men.  They seemed uncomfortable, too.  And he felt, always, that they were laughing at him up their sleeves, or pitying him, or tolerating him.  Then, too, they seemed, by mere¹⁴ contiguity¹⁵, to emphasize a lack in him, to call attention to that in them which he did not possess and which he thanked God he did not possess.  Faugh!  They were like their women!
 
In fact, Percival Ford was no more a woman’s man than he was a man’s man.  A glance at him told the reason.  He had a good constitution, never was on intimate terms with sickness, nor even mild disorders¹⁶; but he lacked vitality.  His was a negative organism.  No blood with a ferment¹⁷ in it could have nourished and shaped that long and narrow face, those thin lips, lean cheeks, and the small, sharp eyes.  The thatch¹⁸ of hair, dust-coloured, straight and sparse¹⁹, advertised the niggard soil, as did the nose, thin, delicately modelled, and just hinting the suggestion of a beak²⁰.  His meagre blood had denied him much of life, and permitted him to be an extremist in one thing only, which thing was righteousness.  Over right conduct he pondered and agonized²¹, and that he should do right was as necessary to his nature as loving and being loved were necessary to commoner clay.
 
He was sitting under the algaroba trees between the lanai and the beach.  His eyes wandered over the dancers and he turned his head away and gazed seaward across the mellow-sounding surf to the Southern Cross burning low on the horizon.  He was irritated by the bare shoulders and arms of the women.  If he had a daughter he would never permit it, never.  But his hypothesis was the sheerest abstraction.  The thought process had been accompanied by no inner vision of that daughter.  He did not see a daughter with arms and shoulders.  Instead, he smiled at the remote contingency²² of marriage.  He was thirty-five, and, having had no personal experience of love, he looked upon it, not as mythical²³, but as bestial²⁴.  Anybody could marry.  The Japanese and Chinese coolies, toiling²⁶ on the sugar plantations²⁷ and in the rice-fields, married.  They invariably married at the first opportunity.  It was because they were so low in the scale of life.  There was nothing else for them to do.  They were like the army men and women.  But for him there were other and higher things.  He was different from them—from all of them.  He was proud of how he happened to be.  He had come of no petty love-match.  He had come of lofty conception of duty and of devotion to a cause.  His father had not married for love.  Love was a madness that had never perturbed²⁹ Isaac Ford.  When he answered the call to go to the heathen with the message of life, he had had no thought and no desire for marriage.  In this they were alike, his father and he.  But the Board of Missions was economical.  With New England thrift³⁰ it weighed and measured and decided³¹ that married missionaries³² were less expensive per capita and more efficacious.  So the Board commanded Isaac Ford to marry.  Furthermore, it furnished him with a wife, another zealous³³ soul with no thought of marriage, intent only on doing the Lord’s work among the heathen.  They saw each other for the first time in Boston.  The Board brought them together, arranged everything, and by the end of the week they were married and started on the long voyage around the Horn.
 
Percival Ford was proud that he had come of such a union.  He had been born high, and he thought of himself as a spiritual aristocrat³⁴.  And he was proud of his father.  It was a passion with him.  The erect³⁵, austere³⁶ figure of Isaac Ford had burned itself upon his pride.  On his desk was a miniature of that soldier of the Lord.  In his bedroom hung the portrait of Isaac Ford, painted at the time when he had served under the Monarchy³⁷ as prime minister.  Not that Isaac Ford had coveted³⁸ place and worldly wealth, but that, as prime minister, and, later, as banker, he had been of greater service to the missionary³⁹ cause.  The German crowd, and the English crowd, and all the rest of the trading crowd, had sneered⁴⁰ at Isaac Ford as a commercial soul-saver; but he, his son, knew different.  When the natives, emerging abruptly⁴² from their feudal⁴³ system, with no conception of the nature and significance of property in land, were letting their broad acres slip through their fingers, it was Isaac Ford who had stepped in between the trading crowd and its prey⁴⁴ and taken possession of fat, vast holdings.  Small wonder the trading crowd did not like his memory.  But he had never looked upon his enormous wealth as his own.  He had considered himself God’s steward⁴⁵.  Out of the revenues he had built schools, and hospitals, and churches.  Nor was it his fault that sugar, after the slump⁴⁶, had paid forty per cent; that the bank he founded had prospered⁴⁷ into a railroad; and that, among other things, fifty thousand acres of Oahu pasture land, which he had bought for a dollar an acre, grew eight tons of sugar to the acre every eighteen months.  No, in all truth, Isaac Ford was an heroic figure, fit, so Percival Ford thought privately⁴⁸, to stand beside the statue of Kamehameha I. in front of the Judiciary Building.  Isaac Ford was gone, but he, his son, carried on the good work at least as inflexibly⁴⁹ if not as masterfully.
 
He turned his eyes back to the lanai.  What was the difference, he asked himself, between the shameless, grass-girdled hula dances and the decollété dances of the women of his own race?  Was there an essential difference? or was it a matter of degree?
 
As he pondered the problem a hand rested on his shoulder.
 
“Hello, Ford, what are you doing here?  Isn’t this a bit festive⁵⁰?”
 
“I try to be lenient⁵¹, Dr. Kennedy, even as I look on,” Percival Ford answered gravely.  “Won’t you sit down?”
 
Dr. Kennedy sat down, clapping his palms sharply.  A white-clad Japanese servant answered swiftly.
 
Scotch⁵² and soda⁵³ was Kennedy’s order; then, turning to the other, he said:—
 
“Of course, I don’t ask you.”
 
“But I will take something,” Ford said firmly.  The doctor’s eyes showed surprise, and the servant waited.  “Boy, a lemonade, please.”
 
The doctor laughed at it heartily⁵⁴, as a joke on himself, and glanced at the musicians under the hau tree.
 
“Why, it’s the Aloha Orchestra,” he said.  “I thought they were with the Hawaiian Hotel on Tuesday nights.  Some rumpus, I guess.”
 
His eyes paused for a moment, and dwelt upon the one who was playing a guitar and singing a Hawaiian song to the accompaniment of all the instruments.
 
His face became grave as he looked at the singer, and it was still grave as he turned it to his companion.
 
“Look here, Ford, isn’t it time you let up on Joe Garland?  I understand you are in opposition⁵⁵ to the Promotion⁵⁶ Committee’s sending him to the States on this surf-board proposition, and I’ve been wanting to speak to you about it.  I should have thought you’d be glad to get him out of the country.  It would be a good way to end your persecution⁵⁷ of him.”
 
“Persecution?”  Percival Ford’s eyebrows⁵⁸ lifted interrogatively.
 
“Call it by any name you please,” Kennedy went on.  “You’ve hounded that poor devil for years.  It’s not his fault.  Even you will admit that.”
 
“Not his fault?”  Percival Ford’s thin lips drew tightly together for the moment.  “Joe Garland is dissolute and idle.  He has always been a wastrel⁵⁹, a profligate⁶⁰.”
 
“But that’s no reason you should keep on after him the way you do.  I’ve watched you from the beginning.  The first thing you did when you returned from college and found him working on the plantation²⁸ as outside luna was to fire him—you with your millions, and he with his sixty dollars a month.”
 
“Not the first thing,” Percival Ford said judicially⁶¹, in a tone he was accustomed to use in committee meetings.  “I gave him his warning.  The superintendent⁶² said he was a capable luna.  I had no objection to him on that ground.  It was what he did outside working hours.  He undid⁶³ my work faster than I could build it up.  Of what use were the Sunday schools, the night schools, and the sewing classes, when in the evenings there was Joe Garland with his infernal and eternal tum-tumming of guitar and ukulele, his strong drink, and his hula dancing?  After I warned him, I came upon him—I shall never forget it—came upon him, down at the cabins.  It was evening.  I could hear the hula songs before I saw the scene.  And when I did see it, there were the girls, shameless in the moonlight and dancing—the girls upon whom I had worked to teach clean living and right conduct.  And there were three girls there, I remember, just graduated from the mission school.  Of course I discharged Joe Garland.  I know it was the same at Hilo.  People said I went out of my way when I persuaded Mason and Fitch to discharge him.  But it was the missionaries who requested me to do so.  He was undoing⁶⁴ their work by his reprehensible⁶⁵ example.”
 
“Afterwards, when he got on the railroad, your railroad, he was discharged without cause,” Kennedy challenged.
 
“Not so,” was the quick answer.  “I had him into my private office and talked with him for half an hour.”
 
“You discharged him for inefficiency⁶⁶?”
 
“For immoral⁶⁷ living, if you please.”
 
Dr. Kennedy laughed with a grating sound.  “Who the devil gave it to you to be judge and jury?  Does landlordism give you control of the immortal⁶⁸ souls of those that toil²⁵ for you?  I have been your physician.  Am I to expect tomorrow your ukase that I give up Scotch and soda or your patronage⁶⁹?  Bah!  Ford, you take life too seriously.  Besides, when Joe got into that smuggling⁷⁰ scrape (he wasn’t in your employ, either), and he sent word to you, asked you to pay his fine, you left him to do his six months’ hard labour on the reef.  Don’t forget, you left Joe Garland in the lurch⁷¹ that time.  You threw him down, hard; and yet I remember the first day you came to school—we boarded, you were only a day scholar—you had to be initiated⁷².  Three times under in the swimming tank—you remember, it was the regular dose every new boy got.  And you held back.  You denied that you could swim.  You were frightened, hysterical—”
 
“Yes, I know,” Percival Ford said slowly.  “I was frightened.  And it was a lie, for I could swim . . . And I was frightened.”
 
“And you remember who fought for you? who lied for you harder than you could lie, and swore he knew you couldn’t swim?  Who jumped into the tank and pulled you out after the first under and was nearly drowned for it by the other boys, who had discovered by that time that you could swim?”
 
“Of course I know,” the other rejoined coldly.  “But a generous act as a boy does not excuse a lifetime of wrong living.”
 
“He has never done wrong to you?—personally and directly, I mean?”
 
“No,” was Percival Ford’s answer.  “That is what makes my position impregnable.  I have no personal spite against him.  He is bad, that is all.  His life is bad—”
 
“Which is another way of saying that he does not agree with you in the way life should be lived,” the doctor interrupted.
 
“Have it that way.  It is immaterial.  He is an idler—”
 
“With reason,” was the interruption, “considering the jobs out of which you have knocked him.”
 
“He is immoral—”
 
“Oh, hold on now, Ford.  Don’t go harping⁷³ on that.  You are pure New England stock.  Joe Garland is half Kanaka.  Your blood is thin.  His is warm.  Life is one thing to you, another thing to him.  He laughs and sings and dances through life, genial⁷⁴, unselfish, childlike, everybody’s friend.  You go through life like a perambulating prayer-wheel, a friend of nobody but the righteous, and the righteous are those who agree with you as to what is right.  And after all, who shall say?  You live like an anchorite.  Joe Garland lives like a good fellow.  Who has extracted the most from life?  We are paid to live, you know.  When the wages are too meagre we throw up the job, which is the cause, believe me, of all rational suicide.  Joe Garland would starve to death on the wages you get from life.  You see, he is made differently.  So would you starve on his wages, which are singing, and love—”
 
“Lust, if you will pardon me,” was the interruption.
 
Dr. Kennedy smiled.
 
“Love, to you, is a word of four letters and a definition which you have extracted from the dictionary.  But love, real love, dewy and palpitant and tender, you do not know.  If God made you and me, and men and women, believe me He made love, too.  But to come back.  It’s about time you quit hounding Joe Garland.  It is not worthy⁷⁵ of you, and it is cowardly.  The thing for you to do is to reach out and lend him a hand.”
 
“Why I, any more than you?” the other demanded.  “Why don’t you reach him a hand?”
 
“I have.  I’m reaching him a hand now.  I’m trying t............