The Common Law

"I can't help it; I'm really frightened, dear. And you know well enough I'm no flighty alarmist. Besides, somehow, I feel certain that Sam's brother would tell John to go to Arizona"—she pointed piteously to her trunk: "It's packed; it has been packed for weeks. I'm all ready to go with him. Why can't a man mould clay and chip marble and cast bronze as well in Arizona as in this vile pest-hole?"

Valerie sat with folded hands looking at her.

"How do you think you could stand that desolation?"

"Arizona?"

"Yes."

"There is another desolation I dread more."

"Do you really love him so?"

Rita slowly turned from the window and looked at her.

"Yes," she said.

"Does he know it, Rita?"

"No, dear."

"Do you think—if he did—"

"No…. How could it be—after what has happened to me?"

"You would tell him?"

"Of course. I sometimes wonder whether he has not already heard—something—from that beast—"

"Does John know him?"

"He has done two fountains for his place at El Naúar. He had several other things in view—" she shrugged—"but The Mohave sailed suddenly with its owner for a voyage around the world—so John was told;—and—Valerie, it's the first clear breath of relief I've drawn since Penrhyn Cardemon entered John's studio."

"I didn't know he had ever been there."

"Yes; twice."

"Did you see him there?"

"Yes. I nearly dropped. At first he did not recognise me—I was very young—when—"

"Did he speak to you?"

"Yes. I managed to answer. John was not looking at me, fortunately…. After that he wrote to me—and I burned the letter…. It was horrible; he said that José Querida was his guest at El Naúar, and he asked me to get you because you knew Querida, and be his guest for a week end…. I cried that night; you heard me."

"Was that it!" asked Valerie, very pale.

"Yes; I was too wretched to tell you,"

Valerie sat silent, her teeth fixed in her lower lip. Then:

"José could not have known what kind of a man the—other—is."

"I hope not."

"Oh, he couldn't have known! Rita, he wouldn't have let him ask us—"

"Men seldom deceive one another."

"You don't think José Querida knew?"

"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!"

"Oh, Valerie, Valerie, if you only knew! If you only knew!"

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