“I was so glad to come again,” she said, holding out her hand to him. “Jamiltepec has become a sort of Mecca to me, my inside yearns for it.”
“Then why don’t you come oftener? I wish you would come.”
“I am afraid of intruding.”
“No! You could help if you would.”
“Oh!” she said. “I am so frightened, and so sceptical of big undertakings. I think it is because, at the very bottom of me, I dislike the masses of people—anywhere. I’m afraid I rather despise people; I don’t want them to touch me, and I don’t want to touch them.—So how could I pretend to join any—any—any sort of Salvation Army?—which is a horrid way of putting it.”
Don Ramón laughed.
“I do myself,” he said. “I detest and despise masses of people. But these are my own people.”
“I, ever since I was a child, since I can remember.—They say of me, when I was a little girl of four, and my parents were having a big dinner party, they had the nurse bring me in to say good-night to all the people they had there dressed up and eating and drinking. And I suppose they all said nice things to me, as they do. I only answered: You are all monkeys! It was a great success!—But I felt it even as a child, and I feel it now. People are all monkeys to me, performing in different ways.”
“Even the people nearest you?”
Kate hesitated. Then she confessed, rather unwillingly: