him,” continued her aunt. “They say he is quite dangerous as well as frivolous, and once he had a grande passion for a married woman, whom he tried to run away with, instead of running away from her, and trying to conquer his feeling as a good man would have done.”
Anne laughed again, for the words sounded curiously of home. Mrs. Garrison was not one who could change her atmosphere, or deviate from her mathematical standard of morality.
“Not try to conquer his feeling as a good man would have done.” Anne repeated the words to herself, conscious of their grotesqueness as applied to a man like Gino Curatulo. With her suppleness of perception she was already conscious of a schism between the human atmosphere into which she had plunged, and the one she had left behind her at home. By loving a woman a man seemed to have established the right to win her if he could, independently of laws of church and state. Feeling rather than ethics was the supreme standard, and the little girl with her Puritan ancestors stood before such a spectacle amazed and bewildered.
“I wonder,” she said aloud suddenly, “if it is true that some men are born to love women, and to do that better than they can do any other thing,28
