“I didn’t know he had ever been there.”

“Yes; twice.”

“Did you see him there?”

“Yes.  I nearly dropped.  At first he did not recognise me—­I was very young—­when—­”

“Did he speak to you?”

“Yes.  I managed to answer.  John was not looking at me, fortunately....  After that he wrote to me—­and I burned the letter....  It was horrible; he said that Jose Querida was his guest at El Nauar, and he asked me to get you because you knew Querida, and be his guest for a week end....  I cried that night; you heard me.”

“Was that it!” asked Valerie, very pale.

“Yes; I was too wretched to tell you,”

Valerie sat silent, her teeth fixed in her lower lip.  Then: 

“Jose could not have known what kind of a man the—­other—­is.”

“I hope not.”

“Oh, he couldn’t have known!  Rita, he wouldn’t have let him ask us—­”

“Men seldom deceive one another.”

“You don’t think Jose Querida knew?”

“I—­don’t—­think....  Valerie, men are very—­very unlike women....  Forgive me if I seem to be embittered....  Even you have had your experience with men—­the men that all the world seems to like—­kind, jolly, generous, jovial, amusing men—­and clever men; men of attainment, of distinction.  And they—­the majority of them—­are, after all, just men, Valerie, just men in a world made for men, a world into which we come like timid intruders; uncertain through generations of uncertainty—­innocently stupid through ages of stupid innocence, ready to please though not knowing exactly how; ready to be pleased, God knows, with pleasures as innocent as the simple minds that dream of them.

“Valerie, I do not believe any evil first came into this world of men through any woman.”

Valerie looked down at her folded hands—­small, smooth, white hands, pure of skin and innocent as a child’s.

“I don’t know,” she said, troubled, “how much more unhappiness arises through men than through women, if any more ...  I like men.  Some are unruly—­like children; some have the sense and the morals of marauding dogs.

“But, at worst, the unruly and the marauders seem so hopelessly beneath one, intellectually, that a girl’s resentment is really more of contempt than of anger—­and perhaps more of pity than of either.”

Rita said:  “I cannot feel as charitably.... You still have that right.”

“Rita!  Rita!” she said softly, “we both have loved men, you with the ignorance and courage of a child—­I with less ignorance and with my courage as yet untested.  Where is the difference between us—­if we love sincerely?”

Rita leaned forward and looked at her searchingly: 

“Do you mean to do—­what you said you would?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because he wants me.”

Rita sprang to her feet and began pacing the floor.