"You are willing to believe that I haven't gone altogether backward?" he queried, after the little car had measured an additional stretch of the mesa road.
"You are bigger and stronger," she repeated.
"How do you know I am?"
"I can tell; any woman could tell."
"Is the acquirement of size and strength so great a thing that—"
"I think it is—in a woman's eyes," she admitted fearlessly. "We are all more or less primitive and—and, well, 'Stone-Agey,' let us say, in the last analysis; at least, women are." And then: "You don't know women very well, Evan."
"Don't I?"
"No, you don't. You judge us by standards which have no existence outside of your own purely masculine deductions. For example: I suppose you wouldn't admit for a moment that a good woman might properly do things which would be entirely discreditable in a man?"
He shook his head slowly and said: "Yesterday, or the day before, I might have said 'no,' with all the cocksureness of a boy of twenty. To-day I can only say: 'Who am I, that I should judge any man—or any woman?'" Then suddenly: "You are making excuses for my father's wife. You needn't, you know. She has fought me from the beginning, and I know it. Sometimes I think that she is solely responsible for my failure to accomplish the thing I had set my heart upon. Let it go; I don't bear malice. Just now I'm more interested in what you were saying about the sex differences and the woman's point of view. Have you been calling me a weak man, Patricia?"
"No; only—a little—conventional," she returned half reluctantly.