The air was balm of a thousand flowers, but for Angela it was no longer "Parfait d'Amour." The two battleships had long ago finished their speed trial; and trails of floating kelp lay like golden sea-serpents asleep under the blue ripple of the sea. Everything was very beautiful. But it was not yesterday!
In the town with the Mission still distant, she began to feel the "foreignness" of Santa Barbara. The streets had Spanish names, and the trees seemed musical, as she had thought that trees seemed in the South of Europe; as if they had heard and seen all the happiness of history, and had set them to music with their branches. Pretty girls rode bareheaded, with sunburned men in sombreros, just outside the straggling town, between hedges of roses that made boundaries for bungalows.
The beauty of the world sang a song in Angela's ears, with the rushing breeze the motor made; the wind in the trees, the flashing lights and shadows on the mountains. Clear-cut, lovely peaks sprang toward a sky that was like fire opal with turquoise glowing blue behind it. Still, this was not yesterday! The song of the world's beauty did not seem meant personally for her, as it had then.
Piles of grain in the fields were like plumed, golden helmets, laid down in rows to await the heads of resting warriors. The California oaks, different from all other oaks, were classic in shape as Greek temples sacred to forest deities, standing against a background of indigo sea. But Miss Dene would talk.
Theodora, in her books, made a speciality of describing the emotional souls of women, her favourite female thermometers being usually at freezing or boiling point—never temperate. Descriptions of scenery she "couldn't do," and what she called "landscape gazing" bored her. She was more interested in people, and big towns, than in wide spaces where Nature tried to lecture her. But because Angela admired the country she admired it, too, more audibly than Angela.
They saved the Mission for the last. Nick had set his heart on showing it to Mrs. May at sunset. As for Theo, though she said so much, he knew by instinct that it was not she who cared for the beauty of the magnolia hedges, the hay-gilded meadows, and the dark oaks that blotted the gold. He felt that he ought to admire Miss Dene, for she was handsome, and put herself out to be kind to him; but he wished the girl away, and was glad that to-morrow she would be travelling with her own friends. When she looked at him with her greenish eyes, she had the air of judging his points, as if he were a portrait she thought of adding to her collection, and of wishing him to look at her. Nick was not to be fascinated in this way.
Along the Cliff Drive they went to the Hope Ranch, and Angela tried to think of the brave old days of the "Roaring Forties," of barbecues, and wedding feasts for Spanish brides—days when the business of life was to love, and laugh, and dance, and spend the money yielded by thousands of rolling acres. According to the stories, all women had been beautiful, all men brave, and ready to fight for the ladies they loved; and though the world had changed since then, faster here than elsewhere, it seemed to her that at heart the men of America had kept to old traditions more closely than men in older countries. Then she smiled at herself for this impression; for, after all, what did she know of American men?
When they turned at last, coming back toward the Mission, to which, somehow, all the rest had been leading up, the setting sun was beating the dusk into sparks of fire.
At first glimpse, alighting before the steps of the restored Mission church, Angela compared it unfavourably in her mind with the lovely shabbiness of San Gabriel. She had a feeling that Santa Barbara the pleasure-place lived on Santa Barbara the Mission, with its history and romance. But she had only to go inside to beg pardon of the church for her first impression. It was easy to remember that there had never been the same stress of poverty here as among the missionary Fathers of San Gabriel, in the City of Angela. Yet in this place, too, there was the same pathetic effect which had brought tears to Angela's eyes in the dim little church at San Gabriel; an effect that once felt and understood, gives the old Spanish Missions their great, undying charm. At Santa Barbara—sweet name, ringing like the silver bells of the Franciscan Fathers—as at San Gabriel, there had been the same striving to copy the noble designs and proportions of the Spanish cathedrals, visioned in spirit by the homesick monks, who knew well they would never see them with bodily eyes again. With simple materials and unskilled Indian workers, these exiled men had striven to reproduce in the far, lonely West the architecture of the East, loved and lost by them forever. The very simplicity of the church made its beauty.