"Indeed, no!" agreed Lola, feelingly, while she smoothed out the thread.
"Take a stitch or two that I may be sure the cotton is really all right!" implored the señora. "Yes, truly Ana is a maid of rare charms. When she marries I shall be desolate!"
"Is there talk of that?" asked Lola, with interest. Ana was now sixteen, and was nearly as heavy as her mother, and much more sedate. In true Mexican fashion the look of youth had left her betimes, and her swarthy plumpness had early hardened and settled to a look of maturity to which future years could add little.
"There is Juan Suarez," said the señora, in a mysterious whisper, "and if I would I could mention others; for, as you know, Lolita, my Ana is very beautiful."
Lola maintained a judicious silence, and the señora continued placidly, "Though she is my child, I am bound to admit it. Her nature is a rare one, too. And when suitors throng about her she only shakes her head. She is lofty. She will not listen. 'No, caballeros,' she says, 'I have regarded your corral. It is too empty.' And one by one they go away weeping, the poor caballeros! She is cruel, my Ana, being so beautiful! Me, I own it—though my heart aches to see the caballeros shedding tears!"
Lola, finding her own face expanding irresistibly, bent lower over Diego's small trousers. The picture of Ana, standing disdainful among the sorrowing caballeros and waving off their pleas with an imperious hand, was one to bring a smile to lips of deadliest gravity. Ana, with her hands on her broad hips, short and thick as a squat brown jug with its handles akimbo,—Ana, with her great clay-colored face and tiny, glittering eyes, with her thick, pale lips and coarse, black hair,—surely none but a mother could view in Ana such charms as bedewed Señora Vigil's eyes only to think of!
"To see unhappiness is a very blade in my heart!" sighed Señora Vigil, recovering herself. "Do not make the thread short, Lolita! No, no! I shall have to thread the needle again before the week is out, if you do. Ah, yes! I wept much the day when you were lost, and Bev Gribble, the vaquero, brought you home on his horse. 'Twas long ago. And now you are grown tall and can play the piano. Shall you go on fretting your poor head with more schooling, chiquita?"
A Prairie Infanta
"'DO NOT MAKE THE THREAD SHORT LOLITA!'"