“Yes! You! Ramón doesn’t believe in womanless gods, he says. Why should you not be the woman in the Quetzalcoatl pantheon? If you will, the goddess!”
“I, a goddess in the Mexican pantheon?” cried Kate, with a burst of startled laughter.
“Why not?” said he.
“But I am not Mexican,” said she.
“You may easily be a goddess,” said he, “in the same pantheon with Don Ramón and me.”
A strange, inscrutable flame of desire seemed to be burning on Cipriano’s face, as his eyes watched her glittering. Kate could not help feeling that it was a sort of intense, blind ambition, of which she was partly an object: a passionate object also: which kindled the Indian to the hottest pitch of his being.
“But I don’t feel like a goddess in a Mexican pantheon,” she said. “Mexico is a bit horrible to me. Don Ramón is wonderful: but I’m so afraid they will destroy him.”
“Come, and help to prevent it.”
“How?”
“You marry me. You complain you have nothing to do. Then marry me. Marry me, and help Ramón and me. We need a woman, Ramón says, to be with us. And you are the woman. There is a great deal to do.”