“In the kitchen, Ascencion!” said her employer. “You talk as if she were a rat.”
“Oh, you will see. The Señor Don Papa,—he goes about saying that he will marry his daughter to none but foreigners,—that they make the best husbands.”
“So they do.”
“Oh, very well, very well, if you are satisfied. It makes no difference to me. It is all the same to me that every one says this is a betrothal party, and the niña does not deny it.”
“Ah, you know very well, proud beauty,” said Vickers, waving a fork at her, “that there is only one woman in all Spanish-America for me—the only woman who knows how to cook, this side of the San Pedro. If you choose to call this our betrothal party, yours and mine, Ascencion——”
It was a perfectly safe joke, for Ascencion was a wife, the mother of fourteen, and the grandmother of a whole village. She did not even notice the last part of his sentence.
“And who is there can cook like me on the other side of the San Pedro?” she asked. “I don’t know her;” and she hobbled away.
After breakfast, Vickers with the assistance of two or three native boys, Ascencion’s grandchildren, who came and went about the house like stray dogs, hung the court and corridors with paper lanterns, and moved the furniture so as to leave the sala free for dancing.
These preparations occupied so much time that he was barely able to finish his report for the government before dinner, and almost immediately afterward his guests began to arrive. He had not had time to write the letter, and he could not now catch the mail unless he sent a boy down the trail to the coast. He actually thought of doing this in order to catch the steamer, for his conscience reproached him, but Ascencion absolutely refused to be deprived of any of her working staff on so great an occasion.
Cortez was the first to arrive. He was carrying his talking-machine in his arms as he entered, and he and Vickers had a great many jokes to exchange as to the rolls fit for the ears of the señoritas.