“Do you not value my love for you?” I asked.

“Oh yes, yes; you know I do.”

“Well, then understand this:  you would utterly and entirely lose it if you became a mother.”

Suzee shrank away from me.

“But why, Treevor?  Hop Lee was so pleased with me....”

“Men have different tastes.  And it is well they have, or the world would be worse than it is.  Some men like children and domesticity and sick-nursing and childish companionship; I don’t.  I like health and beauty, and love and intellect about me, and women who are straight and slim and can inspire my pictures.  That’s why, Suzee, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t gratify my tastes as they do theirs.  There are plenty of men in the world who like being fathers of families; the world can well allow an artist to give it his art instead.”

“Oh yes, Treevor, of course; but I am so sorry.  I am so dull without a baby.”

We were sitting together in a light balcony of one of the hotels at Tampico, and the subject of our conversation was one which had come up many times between us lately.

Some months had slipped by since the accident in the bull-ring.  Suzee had recovered from the shock with a few day’s rest and care, and as soon as she was better we had started on a tour through the country places of Mexico, and as it grew colder we had worked downwards to the gulf of Vera Cruz in the Tierra Caliente, or Hot Lands, and now were making a stay here on the coast, caught by the beauty of palm and sea and shore.

Suzee, though apparently she had all that most young women covet, had been for some time restless and dissatisfied, and the reason soon appeared in conversations like that of to-day.

“Come along,” I said, getting up; “see what a lovely evening it is, let’s go for a walk along the seashore.”

Suzee looked round at the translucent green bell of the sky that hung over us, disapprovingly.

“It’s always fine weather,” she said, rather sulkily; “and there’s nothing to see on that old shore.”

“Nothing to see!” I exclaimed in sheer amazement.  Then I stopped short, remembering her indifference to all I valued, and added:  “There are most beautiful shells of every shape and colour, wouldn’t you like to get some of those?”

Suzee’s face brightened immediately.  This idea took her fancy at once.  It appealed to her keen love of material things.  Beauty in air and sky was nothing to her; but something she could pick up and handle, become possessed of, like the shells, deeply interested her.  She rose at once.

“I had better take a basket, Treevor,” she said, “to carry them back in.”  And while she went to get it, I leant over the balcony-rail musing on that great difference in character between woman and woman, man and man.  Humanity might almost be divided into those two great parts—­those who love and live in ideas; and those who love, and are wholly concerned with, material things.