care. The clever ones were
selfish, the kindly ones were stupid.

"Damn it, if she's going to fall in love with somebody, it had better be
me than any of the others--of the sort she'd find. Get her tied up with
some conceited ass who'd try to make her over, train her like a puppy!
Give one of 'em a big nature like that, and he'd be horrified. He
wouldn't show his face in the clubs until he'd gone after her and combed
her down to conform to some fool idea in his own head--put there by some
other woman, too, his first sweetheart or his grandmother or a maiden
aunt. At least, I understand her. I know what she needs and where she's
bound, and I mean to see that she has a fighting chance."

His own conduct looked crooked, he admitted; but he asked himself
whether, between men and women, all ways were not more or less crooked.
He believed those which are called straight were the most dangerous of
all. They seemed to him, for the most part, to lie between windowless
stone walls, and their rectitude had been achieved at the expense of
light and air. In their unquestioned regularity lurked every sort of
human cruelty and meanness, and every kind of humiliation and suffering.
He would rather have any woman he cared for wounded than crushed. He
would deceive her not once, he told himself fiercely, but a hundred
times, to keep her free.

When Fred went back to the observation car at one o'clock, after the
luncheon call, it was empty, and he found Thea alone on the platform.
She put out her hand, and met his eyes.

"It's as I said. Things have closed behind me. I can't go back, so I am
going on--to Mexico?" She lifted her face with an eager, questioning
smile.

Fred met it with a sinking heart. Had he really hoped she would give him
another answer? He would have given pretty much anything--But there,
that did no good. He could give only what he had. Things were never
complete in this world; you had to snatch at them as they came or go
without. Nobody could look into her face and draw back, nobody who had
any courage. She had courage enough for anything--look at her mouth and
chin and eyes! Where did it come from, that light? How could a face, a
familiar face, become so the picture of hope, be painted with the very
colors of youth's exaltation? She was right; she was not one of those
who draw back. Some people get on by avoiding dangers, others by riding
through them.

They stood by the railing looking back at the sand leve