“I’m rather keen on Mr. Moulton,” he announced, “and have half a mind to join your party. I was going to cut across to Madrid, but he says you have made out rather a jolly trip down the coast and then in to Granada.”
“But we are travelling third class,” she stammered, with the first prompting of snobbery she had ever known. “We—we thought it would be such an experience.”
“So Mr. Moulton told me. I always travel third.”
“You? Why?”
“Poverty,” he said, cheerfully.
Catalina was furious with herself, the more so as she had descended to the level of her cousins, whom she secretly despised as snobs. She did not know how to extricate herself from the position she had assumed, and answered, lamely:
“Poverty? You don’t look poor.”
“Only my debts keep me from being a pauper.”
“And you don’t mind travelling third?”
“Mind? It’s comfortable enough; as comfortable as sleeping on the ground.”