“My amigos?”
“You have received and repaid their visits. But listen! It is not that I would set bounds for your freedom, but if you had stood, as I have, on a street corner in Ciudad, Mexico, and had heard the gringo tourists pass comments on our women—Dios! I choke at the thought! If you but realized their coxcombry, conceit, the contempt in which they hold us—”
She had flushed slightly, but with a toss of her head she broke in: “It is not necessary. I have heard young Mexican men comment on both our own and American women. If the gringos can teach them any lessons—”
“Apes!” he burst angrily in. “Fools! The degenerate apes who put on the vices of civilization with its collars!”
“Perhaps. But, even so, it makes for the same point—there are gringos and gringos just as we have Mexicans and Mexicans.”
“And these, of course, are the other sort?”
“Exactly!” She robbed his sarcasm by her quiet. “If one judges, as one must, by their behavior. I am pleased to find you, for once, of my opinion.”
“Of your opinion?” He regarded her with sudden sternness. “That is, to be friends with these men who have forced themselves in on your lands? I had never expected to hear it fall from the lips of a Garcia. Now listen! What if your people did wound this man? Is he the first? Will he be the last?” His face darkening under a rush of blood, he continued: “I had thought this pair would soon ruin themselves as did the other fools before them. But since they are working on a surer plan—”
“What do you mean?” She searched his face.