"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?"