"None; none whatever," I admitted gloomily. "Still, I have a right, of a sort—the right of the first man. You seem conveniently and successfully to have forgotten. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to forget, though I have tried all of the customary antidotes."
"Other women?" she asked, with the faintest possible touch of malice.
I was resentful enough to meet her baldly upon her own ground.
"There was a young woman in Venezuela; a pure Castilian, with the blood of kings in her veins. I could have married her."
"Why didn't you?" she asked sweetly.
"I have wished many times that I had. I wonder if you can understand if I say that I was afraid?"
"Mr. Kipling says that we can't understand—that we can never understand. But I think I know what you mean. You may have been Adam—the first man, again—for her; but she wasn't, and never could be, Eve—the first woman—for you. Was that it?"
The taxi was finally approaching the quarter of the city in which our wharf lay. There were other things to be said, and they had to be said hurriedly.
"Let us get things straightened out—before the crowd messes in," I said. "Three years ago we were engaged to be married. One day I was obliged to tell your Aunt Mehitable that the comfortable fortune my father had left me had been swallowed up in an exhausted Colorado gold mine, and that I'd have to go to work for a living. She then told me—with what seemed to me to be unnecessary spitefulness—that her will was made in favor of some charitable institution, and since you would thus be left penniless, it was up to me to set you free and give you a chance to marry somebody who could provide for you. Am I stating it clearly?"
"Clearly enough."