I laughed.
"It's the motive then," I said, "that makes the difference in your eyes?"
"Of course," she said frankly. "To marry, to have a family, to be mistress in one's own home, that is—"
"The legitimate ambition of every woman," I concluded for her.
"Si, Senora," she answered, laughing in spite of herself.
"But," I argued, "you must have met other American girls whose interest was not solely centered in the fine art of flirtation."
"I understood them—those you speak of, even less!" said Mercedes guilelessly. "My roommate was such a one. She wanted to be an engineer just fancy! And she was so pretty too!"
"An engineer!" I ejaculated, for even to my American mind this was an unusual ambition for my sex to harbor. "And she had no use for men, too?" I asked.
"That was just it," said Mercedes, in obvious wonderment. "She had any number of men friends: corresponded with them, saw them at dances: they even called upon her at college. But a flirt she was not. They were her friends, she said. And she was like another boy with them. I went to her home once, a little town in Massachusetts, and I could not understand her at all. She was like a sister to her mother, a son to her father, and a comrade to her dance-partners. It was too amazing!"
There was the whole thing in a nutshell, I thought. She could understand but not condone the promiscuous flirtations of her American sisters: but the girl who was comrade to a man, and friend, and who looked on him as such, and not as an extra "scalp" or a possible husband, was beyond her comprehension.