"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. "I will not have it so!" she said excitedly, "I will not have it so! If he is a man--a real man--he will not have it so, either. If he will, he does not love you; mark what I say, Valerie--he does not love you enough. No man can love a woman enough to accept that from her; it would be a paradox, I tell you!" "He loves me enough," said Valerie, very pale. "He could not love me as I care for him; it is not in a man to do it, nor in any human being to love as I love him. You don't understand, Rita. I _must_ be a part of him--not very much, because already there is so much to him--and I am so--so unimportant." "You are more important than he is," said Rita fiercely--"with all your fineness and loyalty and divine sympathy and splendid humility--with your purity and your loveliness; and in spite of his very lofty intellect and his rather amazing genius, and his inherited social respectability--_you_ are the more important to the happiness and welfare of this world--even to the humblest corner in it!" "Rita! Rita! What wild, partisan nonsense you are talking!" [Illustration: "His thoughts were mostly centred on Valerie."] "Oh, Valerie, Valerie, if you only knew! If you only knew!"