He looked at her, in his slow, wondering way. He could make her feel, at moments, as if she were a sort of child and as if he were a ghost.
Kate went to Jamiltepec, and before the two women knew it, almost, they were making dresses for Teresa, cutting up the pineapple-coloured muslin. Poor Teresa, for a bride she had a scanty wardrobe: nothing but her rather pathetic black dresses that somehow made her look poor, and a few old white dresses. She had lived for her father—who had a good library of Mexicana and was all his life writing a history of the State of Jalisco—and for the hacienda. And it was her proud boast that Las Yemas was the only hacienda, within a hundred miles range, which had not been smashed at all during the revolutions that followed the flight of Porfirio Diaz.
Teresa had a good deal of the nun in her. But that was because she was deeply passionate, and deep passion tends to hide within itself, rather than expose itself to vulgar contact.
So Kate pinned the muslin over the brown shoulders, wondering again at the strange, uncanny softness of the dark skin, the heaviness of the black hair. Teresa’s family, the Romeros, had been in Mexico since the early days of the Conquest.
Teresa wanted long sleeves.
“My arms are so thin!” she murmured, hiding her slender brown arms with a sort of shame. “They are not beautiful like yours.”
Kate was a strong, full-developed woman of forty, with round, strong white arms.
“No!” she said to Teresa. “Your arms are not thin: they are exactly right for your figure, and pretty and young and brown.”
“But make the sleeves long, to the wrist,” pleaded Teresa.
And Kate did so, realizing it became the other woman’s nature better.