Her own house seemed empty, banal, vulgar. For the first time in her life, she felt the banality and emptiness even of her own milieu. Though the Casa de las Cuentas was not purely her own milieu.
“Ah Niña, how good! How good that you have come! Ay, in the night, how much water! Much! Much! But you were safe in the hacienda, Niña. Ah, how nice, that hacienda of Jamiltepec. Such a good man, Don Ramón—isn’t he, Niña? He cares a great deal for his people. And the Señora, ah, how sympathetic she is!”
Kate smiled and was pleasant. But she felt more like going into her room and saying: For God’s sake, leave me alone, with your cheap rattle.
She suffered again from the servants. Again that quiet, subterranean insolence against life, which seems to belong to modern life. The unbearable note of flippant jeering, which is underneath almost all modern utterance. It was underneath Juana’s constant cry.—Niña! Niña!
At meal-times Juana would seat herself on the ground at a little distance from Kate, and talk, talk in her rapid mouthfuls of conglomerate words with trailing, wistful endings: and all the time watch her mistress with those black, unseeing eyes on which the spark of light would stir with the peculiar slow, malevolent jeering of the Indian.
Kate was not rich—she had only her moderate income.
“Ah, the rich people—!” Juana would say.
“I am not rich,” said Kate.
“You are not rich, Niña?” came the singing, caressive bird-like voice: “Then, you are poor?”—this was indescribable irony.
“No, I am not poor either. I am not rich, and I am not poor,” said Kate.