s long as I can remember--twenty years, perhaps."

"Twenty years, and always looked like that and not married to him? Sweet
Mother of God!" she cried in the quaintest tone imaginable, sinking back
in her chair. "Had I known him as many weeks I had either married him or
killed myself!"

"Nobody takes love so seriously as that!" laughed Blanch.

"Ah! you have never loved him!" she said, after a short silence.

"Why do you suppose I am here?" returned Blanch.

"Then how could you have lived near him all these years without marrying
him?"

"It was a mistake, I admit," answered Blanch good-humoredly. "But you
must understand that we don't regard love in quite the same light as you
do. We don't make a great fuss about it and talk of killing ourselves,
and that sort of thing. We get married when we find it convenient."

"Ah, yes, I know," answered Chiquita, "but I'm sure you can never be as
much to him as I can. What have you endured, what have you suffered to
make you feel and realize the full significance of love?"

"Do you imagine," asked Blanch in surprise, "that there is any less of
the woman in me because I have been spared the things which you perhaps
have been forced to endure, or that one must first suffer before one is
capable of loving?"

"No, I don't think that, for love is a thing like sleep, it comes upon
us unawares. But it seems to me I am better fitted for him than you are;
that my love, tempered by my life's experience, must be fuller and
deeper and richer than that which you have to offer him. What," she
continued, "do you really know of life? Not the social side of it, of
which your life has been so full, but life as it really is? Were you
born under the open heavens? Have you slept on the hard, cold ground,
exposed to the weather, or nearly perished of hunger and thirst? Could
you feed and clothe yourself from the naked earth without the assistance
of others? Have you seen men, women and children starve, or ruthlessly
struck down by your side, or nursed them through some terrible scourge
like the smallpox?

"All your life you have been protected and cared for, while all my life
I have been obliged to face the reality of things, forced to work, to
procure the simple necessities of life. I have carried wood and water,
cooked, and fed and clothed myself and others with the materials
provided by my own hands. And yet, when I look back upon my life, I
would not surrender one hour of the true happines