They left the post-office with bristling tempers.
“It is a relief to hate something in Spain,” cried Catalina. “And I hate the post, the telegraph, and the banks. There is a cab. I have had enough of walking for one day.”
XXIII
After luncheon Miss Holmes put her arm through Catalina’s. “Come into my room and talk to me a little while,” she murmured. “I am so tired of all these men.”
Catalina had stiffened at the contact, but pride made her yield at once. She turned with a smile in her eyes, and the other girl exclaimed, impulsively, “You are the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life!”
“Oh!” said Catalina, melting; but it was characteristic that she merely accepted the tribute as her due and did not return it in kind.
The two girls presented an edifying spectacle for the eyes of puzzled man as they walked off, arm in arm; moreover, at the finish of an hour’s chat in Miss Holmes’s cool little room they were very good friends, for women may hate each other as rivals but like each other as human creatures of the same sex. They have so many feminine interests in common, that man often dips over the horizon of memory while the mind is alive with the small and normal, only to resume his sway when it is vacant again.
Miss Holmes, sitting on the floor, her hands clasped about her knees, proved to be much like any other girl, and entertained Catalina with lively anecdotes of her experience in Europe. Unconsciously she revealed much that evoked Catalina’s sympathies. She made her own clothes, and it was evident that her life was harried by small economies whose names Catalina barely knew. She was a piece of respectable driftwood in Europe anchored to a still more respectable sister, and the more remarkable that she still was able to suggest a young woman of the leisure class.
“Of course I must marry,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Unfortunately, the only man I ever wanted to marry is a prince without a cent—you meet scions of all the nobility in pensions; but that, of course, means that they are as poor as you are. I suppose that you—independent as you are—won’t marry for ages?”