"José Querida's death has had a curious effect on me. I was inclined to care very sincerely for him; I comprehended him better than many people, I think. Yet there was much in him that I never understood. And I doubt that he ever entirely understood himself. "I believe that he was really a great painter, Louis--and have sometimes thought that his character was mediæval at the foundations--with five centuries of civilisation thinly deposited over the bed-rock.... In him there seemed to be something primitive; something untamable, and utterly irreconcilable with, the fundamental characteristics of modern man. "He was my friend.... Friendship, they say, is a record of misunderstandings; and it was so with us But may I tell you something? José Querida loved me--in his own fashion. "What kind of a love it was--of what value--I can not tell you. I do not think it was very high in the scale. Only he felt it for me, and for no other woman, I believe. "It never was a love that I could entirely understand or respect; yet,--it is odd but true--I cared something for it--perhaps because, in spite of its unfamiliar and sometimes repellent disguises--it _was_ love after all. "And now, as at heart and in mind you and I are one; and as I keep nothing of real importance from you--perhaps _can_ not; I must tell you that José Querida came that day to ask me to marry him. "I tried to make him understand that I could not think of such a thing; and he lost his head and became violent. That is how the table fell:--I had started toward the door when he sprang back to block me, and the low window-sill caught him under the knees, and he fell outward into the yard. "I know of course that no blame could rest on me, but it was a terrible and dreadful thing that happened there in one brief second; and somehow it seems to have moved in me depths that have never before been stirred. "The newspapers, as you know, published it merely as an accident--which it really was. But they might have made it, by innuendo, a horror for me. However, they put it so simply and so unsuspiciously that José Querida might have been any nice man calling on any nice woman. "Louis, I have never been so lonely in my life as I have been since José Querida died; alas! not because he has gone out of my life forever, but because, somehow, the manner of his death has made me realise how difficult it is for a woman alone to contend with men in a man's own world.