he ever entirely understood himself.

"I believe that he was really a great painter, Louis--and have sometimes
thought that his character was mediaeval 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?
Jose 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 Jose 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 Jose
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 Jose
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.

"Do what she may to maintain her freedom, her integrity, there is
always,--sometimes impalpable, sometimes not--a steady, remorseless
pressure on her, forcing her unwillingly to take frightened cognisance
of men;--take