“Rubbish! There is no reason why I shouldn’t have two elegant daughters,” retorted the Doña, wondering the while why exactly Teresa was jealous of Concha. “It must be a man; but who?” she asked herself. Aloud she said, “I wonder why tea is so late. By the way, I told you, didn’t I, that Arnold is coming for the week-end and bringing Guy? And some young cousin of Guy’s—I think he said his name was Dundas.”
“I know—Rory Dundas. Guy often talks about him. He’s a soldier, so he’ll probably be even more tiresome than Guy.”
Oho! How, exactly, was this to be interpreted?
“Why, Teresa, a nice young officer, with beautiful blue eyes like Guy perhaps, only not slouching like Cambridge men, and you think that he will be tiresome!”
Again Teresa smiled amicably, and wished for the thousandth time that her mother would sometimes stop being ironical—or, at any rate, that her irony had a different flavour.
“And so Guy is tiresome too, is he?”
Teresa laughed. “No one shows more that they think so than you, Doña.”
“Oh! but I think all Englishmen tiresome.”
Then the butler and parlour-maid appeared with tea; and a few minutes later Concha, the other daughter, strolled up, her arm round the waist of a small, elderly lady.
Concha was a very beautiful girl of twenty-two. She was tall, and built delicately on a generous scale; her hair was that variety of auburn which, when found among women of the Latin races, never fails to give a thrill of unexpectedness, and a whiff of romance—hinting at old old rapes by Normans and Danes. As one looked at her one realised what a beautiful creature the Doña must once have been.