“Very much. Are Mrs. Newbury and her husband great friends of Mr. Barclay’s?”
“I believe they are. I don’t know much about her. I know her husband in business. He’s a little dried up, but he’s a first-rate fellow in the main.”
“Is she an American? She looks so queer and foreign.”
“Spanish, Spanish-Californian. She and her sister were two celebrated beauties here about twelve years ago. Their name was Romero—Carmen and Guadalupé Romero—and they were very poor. Their grandfather had been a sort of a Shepherd King, owned a Spanish grant about as big as a European principality, and when the Gringo came traded off big chunks of it for lengths of calico and old firearms and books he couldn’t read. The girls were friends of Mrs. Davenport’s only daughter Annie, and she gave them a start. Carmen—she was the elder of the two—married an Englishman, a man of position and means that she met in this house. She lives over in England. This one—Lupé—married Newbury about ten years ago.”
“Do you think she’s pretty?” asked June, anxious to have her uncertainty on this point settled by what she regarded as expert opinion.
“No. I don’t admire her at all. She was handsome when she married. Those Spanish women all get too fat. You saw something of Barclay at Foleys after I left, didn’t you?”
She dropped her eyes to the hands folded in her lap and said with a nonchalant air,
“Yes, he was at Foleys for over a week. He came back from Thompson’s Flat just after you left, and he used to come and see us every afternoon. We had lots of fun. He helped us with the garden, and he didn’t know how to do anything, and we had to teach him.”
“You saw a lot of Rion Gracey too, I suppose,” said her companion, with a sidelong eye on her.
It pleased him to note that at this remark she looked suddenly conscious.