He shook his head slowly and said:  “Yesterday, or the day before, I might have said ‘no,’ with all the cocksureness of a boy of twenty.  To-day I can only say:  ’Who am I, that I should judge any man—­or any woman?’” Then suddenly:  “You are making excuses for my father’s wife.  You needn’t, you know.  She has fought me from the beginning, and I know it.  Sometimes I think that she is solely responsible for my failure to accomplish the thing I had set my heart upon.  Let it go; I don’t bear malice.  Just now I’m more interested in what you were saying about the sex differences and the woman’s point of view.  Have you been calling me a weak man, Patricia?”

“No; only—­a little—­conventional,” she returned half reluctantly.

“But you are the quintessence of conventionality yourself!” he burst out.

“Am I?  Perhaps that was a passing phase, too.  Quite probably the little things will remain—­the dressing for dinner and the paying of party calls and all that.  But one really big man has made many things seem petty and trifling—­things that I used to think were of the greatest possible importance.”

“My father, you mean?”

“Yes.  If I should ever marry, Evan, I should be deliriously happy if I could find a man who promised to grow to the stature of your father.”

There was manifestly no rejoinder to be made to this by David Blount’s son, though it pointed to another and still more painful involvement.  What would Patricia say when the debacle came?  Would she lose faith in his father, and in all masculinity, in the crash?  Or would she borrow yet again from the primitive woman she had been half-acknowledging and still be loyal?  In either case Blount saw his own finish, and he was rather relieved when she left the sex argument indeterminate and began to talk of other things:  of her father’s decision to go home at the end of the following week, of the good times she had been having, and of the regret with which she would turn her back upon the wide horizons and the freedom of it all.

“I brought my shell with me when I came,” she confessed, laughing, “but I think it is broken into little pieces by now.  You will know how small the pieces are when I tell you that ‘Tennessee Jim,’ your father’s horse wrangler, calls me ‘Miz’ Pat,’ and it always makes me want to shake hands with him.”

Blount made the afternoon last as he could, sending the little car over many miles of the mesa roads and encouraging the small confidences which were enabling him to postpone his own evil hour.  When the sun was dipping toward the Carnadine Hills they returned over a trail which came into the main Quaretaro road at a point where the northern highway begins its descent to the lower mesa level.  Half-way down the descending gulch they came to the mouth of a small lateral canyon breaking into the larger gorge from the eastward; a canyon dry for the greater part of the year, but in the rainy season affording an outlet for the flood-waters of the Little Shonoho.