hands with exasperation at not being
able to take the public affairs of the country as seriously as the incidental
atrocity of methods deserved. She saw in them a comedy of naive pretences, but
hardly anything genuine except her own appalled indignation. Charles, very quiet
and twisting his long moustaches, would decline to discuss them at all. Once,
however, he observed to her gently -
    »My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here.«
    These few words made her pause as if they had been a sudden revelation.
Perhaps the mere fact of being born in the country did make a difference. She
had a great confidence in her husband; it had always been very great. He had
struck her imagination from the first by his unsentimentalism, by that very
quietude of mind which she had erected in her thought for a sign of perfect
competency in the business of living. Don José Avellanos, their neighbour across
the street, a statesman, a poet, a man of culture, who had represented his
country at several European Courts (and had suffered untold indignities as a
state prisoner in the time of the tyrant Guzman Bento), used to declare in Doña
Emilia's drawing-room that Carlos had all the English qualities of character
with a truly patriotic heart.
    Mrs. Gould, raising her eyes to her husband's thin, red and tan face, could
not detect the slightest quiver of a feature at what he must have heard said of
his patriotism. Perhaps he had just dismounted on his return from the mine; he
was English enough to disregard the hottest hours of the day. Basilio, in a
livery of white linen and a red sash, had squatted for a moment behind his heels
to unstrap the heavy, blunt spurs in the patio; and then the Señor Administrator
would go up the staircase into the gallery. Rows of plants in pots, ranged on
the balustrade between the pilasters of the arches, screened the corrédor with
their leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below, whose paved space is the
true hearthstone of a South American house, where the quiet hours of domestic
life are marked by the shifting of light and shadow on the flagstones.
    Señor Avellanos was in the habit of crossing the patio at five o'clock
almost every day. Don José chose to come over at tea-time because the English
rite at Doña Emilia's house reminded him of the time he lived in London as
Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James. He did not like tea; and,
usually, rocking his American chair, his neat little shiny boots crossed