“I think not—­to you,” he returned, matching her low tone.  “Let it be enough to say that I am no longer the man I was when I came out here.  Patricia, I’m not fighting bare-handed any more; I’m smashing in with any weapon I can get hold of.  There will be no such reform as the one you urged me to champion—­as the era of fair-dealing and sincerity which I have been trying honestly and earnestly to inaugurate.  Nevertheless, if my hand doesn’t tremble too much at the critical moment, there will be, on the morning of next Tuesday, such a revolution as this commonwealth has never seen.  Though they have robbed me and made a puppet of me, I can still bring it about.”

He had gone farther than he meant to, and he thought she would protest.  He knew that her convictions of what should be and what should not be were clear-cut and definite.  But a man, even though he be a lover, may know a woman’s mind without knowing very much about the woman herself.  There was no protest forthcoming.  Quite the contrary, she answered him with a little shudder that was almost a caress, saying:  “I think you have grown—­bigger and stronger than I ever thought you could grow, Evan; and I’m sure your hand won’t tremble.  Is that what you want me to say?”

Since there is no more contradictory being in a sentient world than a man in love, Blount was not quite sure that it was what he wanted her to say.  By times, to any lover worthy of the name, the chosen woman figures as a goddess, a tutelary divinity postulating for a mere earthly man all that is high and holy and inerrant; an impeccable standard by which he can measure his own baser desires and ambitions and be shrived of them.  At other times the straitly human has its innings, and the longing is for a comrade, a companion, a second self buried, lost, submerged in the loyalty which never questions.  Having come slowly to maturity as a lover, Blount had been leaning toward the divinity definition of Patricia Anners.  But now the iconoclastic change was breaking many images.

“You are willing to believe that I haven’t gone altogether backward?” he queried, after the little car had measured an additional stretch of the mesa road.

“You are bigger and stronger,” she repeated.

“How do you know I am?”

“I can tell; any woman could tell.”

“Is the acquirement of size and strength so great a thing that—­”

“I think it is—­in a woman’s eyes,” she admitted fearlessly.  “We are all more or less primitive and—­and, well, ‘Stone-Agey,’ let us say, in the last analysis; at least, women are.”  And then:  “You don’t know women very well, Evan.”

“Don’t I?”

“No, you don’t.  You judge us by standards which have no existence outside of your own purely masculine deductions.  For example:  I suppose you wouldn’t admit for a moment that a good woman might properly do things which would be entirely discreditable in a man?”