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.

"But you are the quintessence of conventionality yourself!" he burst
out.

"Am I? Perhaps that was a passing phase, too. Quite probably the little
things will remain--the dressing for dinner and the paying of party
calls and all that. But one really big man has made many things seem
petty and trifling--things that I used to think were of the greatest
possible importance."

"My father, you mean?"

"Yes. If I should ever marry, Evan, I should be deliriously happy if I
could find a man who promised to grow to the stature of your father."

There was manifestly no rejoinder to be made to this by David Blount's
son, though it pointed to another and still more painful involvement.
What would Patricia say when the _debacle_ came? Would she lose faith in
his father, and in all masculinity, in the crash? Or would she borrow
yet again from the primitive woman she had been half-acknowledging and
still be loyal? In either case Blount saw his own finish, and he was
rather relieved when she left the sex argument indeterminate and began
to talk of other things: of her father's decision to go home at the end
of the following week, of the good times she ha