linen jacket drawn on
carelessly over the flannel check shirt, would remark to each other, »Here is
the Señor doctor going to call on Doña Emilia. He has got his little coat on.«
The inference was true. Its deeper meaning was hidden from their simple
intelligence. Moreover, they expended no store of thought on the doctor. He was
old, ugly, learned - and a little loco - mad, if not a bit of a sorcerer, as the
common people suspected him of being. The little white jacket was in reality a
concession to Mrs. Gould's humanizing influence. The doctor, with his habit of
sceptical, bitter speech, had no other means of showing his profound respect for
the character of the woman who was known in the country as the English Señora.
He presented this tribute very seriously indeed; it was no trifle for a man of
his habits. Mrs. Gould felt that, too, perfectly. She would never have thought
of imposing upon him this marked show of deference.
    She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in Sulaco) open
for the dispensation of the small graces of existence. She dispensed them with
simplicity and charm because she was guided by an alert perception of values.
She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate
shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.
Charles Gould (the Gould family, established in Costaguana for three
generations, always went to England for their education and for their wives)
imagined that he had fallen in love with a girl's sound common sense like any
other man, but these were not exactly the reasons why, for instance, the whole
surveying camp, from the youngest of the young men to their mature chief, should
have found occasion to allude to Mrs. Gould's house so frequently amongst the
high peaks of the Sierra. She would have protested that she had done nothing for
them, with a low laugh and a surprised widening of her grey eyes, had anybody
told her how convincingly she was remembered on the edge of the snow-line above
Sulaco. But directly, with a little capable air of setting her wits to work, she
would have found an explanation. »Of course, it was such a surprise for these
boys to find any sort of welcome here. And I suppose they are homesick. I
suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.«
    She was always sorry for homesick people.
    Born in the country, as his father before him, spare and tall, with a
flaming moustache