And perhaps, she thought to herself, the white and half-white Mexicans suffered some peculiar reaction in their blood which made them that they too were almost always in a state of suppressed irritation and anger, for which they must find a vent. They must spend their lives in a complicated game of frustration, frustration of life in its ebbing and flowing.
Perhaps something came out of the earth, the dragon of the earth, some effluence, some vibration which militated against the very composition of the blood and nerves in human beings. Perhaps it came from the volcanoes. Or perhaps even from the silent, serpent-like dark resistance of those masses of ponderous natives whose blood was principally the old, heavy, resistant Indian blood.
Who knows? But something there was, and something very potent. Kate lay on her bed and brooded her own organic rage. There was nothing to be done?
But young Garcia was really nice. He called in the afternoon and sent up his card. Kate, feeling sore, received him unwillingly.
“I came,” he said, with a little stiff dignity, like an ambassador on a mission, “to tell you that I, too, don’t like those caricatures. I, too, don’t like them. I don’t like the young people, boys and girls, no?—to be seeing them all the time. I, too, don’t like. But I think, also, that here in Mexico, we can’t help it. People are very bad, very greedy, no?—they only want to get money here, and they don’t care. So we must hate them. Yes, we must. But I, too, I don’t like it.”
He held his hat in his two hands, and twisted his shoulders in a conflict of feelings.
Kate suddenly laughed, and he laughed too, with a certain pain and confusion in his laughter.
“That’s awfully nice of you to come and say so,” she said, warming to him.
“No, not nice,” he said, frowning. “But I don’t know what to do. Perhaps you think I am—different—I am not the thing that I am. And I don’t want it.”
He flushed and was uncomfortable. There was a curious naïve sincerity about him, since he was being sincere. If he had chosen to play a game of sophistication, he could have played it better. But with Kate he wanted to be sincere.