Friendship, they say, is a record of misunderstandings; and it was so with us But may I tell you something?
Jose Querida loved me--in his own fashion.
"What kind of a love it was--of what value--I can not tell you.

I do not think it was very high in the scale.

Only he felt it for me, and for no other woman, I believe.
"It never was a love that I could entirely understand or respect; yet,--it is odd but true--I cared something for it--perhaps because, in spite of its unfamiliar and sometimes repellent disguises--it _was_ love after all.
"And now, as at heart and in mind you and I are one; and as I keep nothing of real importance from you--perhaps _can_ not; I must tell you that Jose Querida came that day to ask me to marry him.
"I tried to make him understand that I could not think of such a thing; and he lost his head and became violent.

That is how the table fell:--I had started toward the door when he sprang back to block me, and the low window-sill caught him under the knees, and he fell outward into the yard.
"I know of course that no blame could rest on me, but it was a terrible and dreadful thing that happened there in one brief second; and somehow it seems to have moved in me depths that have never before been stirred.
"The newspapers, as you know, published it merely as an accident--which it really was.

But they might have made it, by innuendo, a horror for me.