“What are my affairs to you?” she asked, haughtily.
“For this trip I am your big brother. I should not merit the friendship of your father if I did not make this affair my own. Brothers are always privileged to be rude, you know: you are not only playing a silly game, but a dangerous one. That man will try to kidnap you—he is only one degree removed from a bandit.” Lydia’s eyes flashed, and he hastened to rectify a possible misstep. “How would you like to live in the side of a hill with your lord—to escape taxes—and cook his frijoles three hundred and sixty-five days of the year? If he didn’t beat you, he certainly would not serenade you; and even in a country where water is more plentiful than in Spain—suppose you induced him to emigrate—it is doubtful if he would ever take a bath—”
“You are a brute!”
“Merely practical. He would insist upon having his beans flavored with garlic, and he doubtless smokes all night as well as all day. He may be a good enough sort in the main, but there is no hope here for a man to rise above his station in life. If there were a revolution he would probably be in the thick of it and get himself killed; and if he followed you to America—failing to kidnap you—he would probably open a cigar-shop on the Bowery.”
He had expected tears, but Lydia drew herself up and said, coldly: “I don’t think I am in danger of being kidnapped. Strange as it may appear, I feel quite well able to take care of myself, and if with you on one side and father on the other I can’t vary the monotony of life with a little flirtation—well, if you were a girl, surrounded by goody-goody people as I have always been, you might be tempted a little way by something that had the glamour of romance.”
“Girls must find life rather a bore,” said Over, sympathetically. “And I only wish your hero were worthy of you, but, take my word for it, his romantic picturesqueness is only skin—clothes deep. No man is romantic, if it comes to that. I met a long-haired poet once, and when we got him in the smoking-room he was the prosiest of the lot.”
“There is no such thing as romance, then?” asked Lydia, with a sigh.
“Not when you are ‘up against it,’ to use a bit of your own slang.”
As the radiating streets were dark they paced slowly about the plaza. For a time Lydia was silent, and Over drew thoughtfully at his pipe. Finally he asked, curiously:
“Do you women really get any satisfaction out of that sort of thing—talking with your eyes and exchanging an occasional note? I mean, of course, unless you have a definite idea that it is going to lead to something?”