CHAPTER XVI
On the morning of the first day of June Neville came into his studio and found there a letter from Valerie:
"DEAREST: I am not keeping my word to you; I am asking you for more time; and I know you will grant it.
"José Querida's death has had a curious effect on me. I was inclined to care very sincerely for him; I comprehended him better than many people, I think. Yet there was much in him that I never understood. And I doubt that he ever entirely understood himself.
"I believe that he was really a great painter, Louis—and have sometimes thought that his character was mediæval at the foundations—with five centuries of civilisation thinly deposited over the bed-rock…. In him there seemed to be something primitive; something untamable, and utterly irreconcilable with, the fundamental characteristics of modern man.
"He was my friend…. Friendship, they say, is a record of misunderstandings; and it was so with us But may I tell you something? José Querida loved me—in his own fashion.
"What kind of a love it was—of what value—I can not tell you. I do not think it was very high in the scale. Only he felt it for me, and for no other woman, I believe.
"It never was a love that I could entirely understand or respect; yet,—it is odd but true—I cared something for it—perhaps because, in spite of its unfamiliar and sometimes repellent disguises—it was love after all.
"And now, as at heart and in mind you and I are one; and as I keep nothing of real importance from you—perhaps can not; I must tell you that José Querida came that day to ask me to marry him.
"I tried to make him understand that I could not think of such a thing; and he lost his head and became violent. That is how the table fell:—I had started toward the door when he sprang back to block me, and the low window-sill caught him under the knees, and he fell outward into the yard.