At first Rosita had nothing to say. Upon entering she had merely to fling herself upon a divan in an indolent attitude whilst the others carried on a spirited dialogue. Patience saw that she had managed to get to the sofa without falling prone, but also observed that her bosom was heaving. Nevertheless, when her time came she managed to drawl her lines, although with as little expression as she told her rosary. Patience stamped her foot audibly.
But as the play progressed it was evident that Rosita was recovering her poise. When she finally had to come forward she moved with all the indolent grace of her blood, and delivered her little speech with such piquant fire that the audience applauded loudly. And with that clatter of feet and hands a new light sprang into the Spanish girl’s eyes, an expression half of surprise, half of transport. From that time on she acted in a manner which astonished even her instructor.
She looked exquisitely pretty. Her white rounded neck and arms were bare. Her black soft hair hung to her knees, unbound, caught back above one little ear with a pink rose. Her dress was of black Spanish lace covered with natural roses. On her tiny feet she wore a pair of black satin slippers which had belonged to her grandmother and twinkled many a time to the music of El Son.
When, upon being twitted with her indolence, she suddenly sprang to the front of the stage, and after singing an old Spanish love-song to the music of her own guitar, danced El Son with all the rhythmic grace of the beautiful women of the old gay time, she was no longer an actress but an impersonator. The more the delighted audience applauded the more poetically she danced, the more significantly her long eyes flamed. Once when the applause deafened she swayed as if intoxicated. As the dance finished, her red lips were parted. She was panting slightly.
When the curtain fell Patience rushed into the dressing-room and embraced her rapturously. “Rosita!” she cried, “you were simply, mag-nif-icent.”
Rosita, who was trembling violently, hung about Patience’s neck.
“Oh, Patita!” she gasped. “I was in heaven. I never was so happy. You don’t know what it is to have a hundred people thinking of nothing but you and applauding as if they were mad. Oh, I’m going to act, act, act forever! I never want to do anything else. And isn’t my skin white? I wish I had two necks and four arms.”
XIII
The next morning prizes were distributed. Patience took most of them, but Rosita was still the sensation of the hour, although she had not passed an examination. At noon she had a luncheon party. She sat at the head of her table in a white dotted Swiss frock and Roman sash, and talked faster than she had ever talked in her life before. Altogether she was by no means the Rosita of twenty-four hours ago.
Mrs. Thrailkill had prepared a luncheon of old time Spanish dishes, and hovered, large and brown and placid, about a table loaded with chickens under mounds of yellow rice, tamales, and dulces. Patience, between Manuela and a young cousin of Rosita’s, was not unhappy. Her prizes lay on the window seat, she liked good things, and was infected with the gaiety of the hour. True, she wore her old muslin frock and a plaid sash made from an ancient gown of her mother’s, and the rest of the girls looked like a bed of newly blossomed flowers; but at fifteen the spirits rise high above trifles.