Suzee came over to where I was sitting and knelt beside my chair, clasping both hands round my arm.
"Treevor," she said, almost in a whisper, "you are so beautiful with your straight face, every line in it is so straight, quite straight; and your black hair and your dark eyes and your dark eyebrows. I want that for my baby. I want a son just like you; he must be just like you, and then I should be so happy."
As she spoke, the lines of a poetess flashed across me, indistinctly remembered--"beauty that women seek after ... that they may give to the world again."
Was this the reason of woman's love of beauty in men? Ah, not with all women! Viola loved beauty, as I did, as all artists do, as they love their art, for itself alone.
I stroked her smooth shining hair, gently, and shook my head, smiling down upon her.
"Do you not value my love for you?" I asked.
"Well, then understand this: you would utterly and entirely lose it if you became a mother."
"But why, Treevor? Hop Lee was so pleased with me...."
"Men have different tastes. And it is well they have, or the world would be worse than it is. Some men like children and domesticity and sick-nursing and childish companionship; I don't. I like health and beauty, and love and intellect about me, and women who are straight and slim and can inspire my pictures. That's why, Suzee, and I don't see any reason why I shouldn't gratify my tastes as they do theirs. There are plenty of men in the world who like being fathers of families; the world can well allow an artist to give it his art instead."
"Oh yes, Treevor, of course; but I am so sorry. I am so dull without a baby."
We were sitting together in a light balcony of one of the hotels at Tampico, and the subject of our conversation was one which had come up many times between us lately.
Some months had slipped by since the accident in the bull-ring. Suzee had recovered from the shock with a few day's rest and care, and as soon as she was better we had started on a tour through the country places of Mexico, and as it grew colder we had worked downwards to the gulf of Vera Cruz in the Tierra Caliente, or Hot Lands, and now were making a stay here on the coast, caught by the beauty of palm and sea and shore.