But now the iconoclastic change was breaking many
images.
"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.
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