The Maestro felt the necessity of some deep, careful thinking. For certainly, of all the difficulties which, in his two years' career, he had alertly fought and conquered, none had ever confronted him of nature so delicate.
II
It's always when you think that you have at last mastered the problem of this life and evolved a system that promises smooth going the rest of the way that the skies tumble down upon you.
Thus it was with the Maestro. Just when he had brought the school system of his pueblo to the point where, he fondly dreamed, he could sit back and watch it run along the nickel-plated tracks that he had so carefully laid, there came the washout and the promise of wreck.
The blow was a hard one, and for a while, very much in contradiction to his custom, the Maestro buried himself in thought of past achievements and his heart softened toward himself in a great burst of self-compassion.
He thought of the fight, the long, bitter, patient fight, he had had to find a Maestra and get his girls' school started. The hunt for a Maestra, what an Iliad, and what an Odyssey! First the careful canvas of the pueblo, the horror of the chosen at the thought of degrading themselves to the point of teaching in a public school, the rebuffs of parents, the tearful indignation of mothers; then, the pueblo proving impossible, the long rides into the surrounding country, to far haciendas, in search of the longed-for Being! Once he had crossed the swollen Ilog, and had been nearly drowned with his horse, to find the fair one of whom he had heard glowing reports—she was very well educated, si Señor, had been to collegio in Manila for four years, yes, four years; and she could play the piano, ah, divinely, and she could sew and weave jusi, just like the mother of God—to find this marvel deaf, deaf as a post!
And then, suddenly, he had met Her!
His being still thrilled at the memory. He had met her, Constancia de la Rama, at a baile. She was dancing the escupiton, and right away he saw that she was not as the others. The grace of her balancing waist, of the airy arm-gestures was not rounded and timid as that of her sisters—her grace was angular. Her black eyes did not fix a hypothetical point between her shilena-shod little feet; they looked boldly at those who addressed her. She did not squirm and giggle at compliments, but accepted them freely and boisterously. And the Maestro had the irritating sense of having met her somewhere, sometime, before.
He danced with her. In honour of the Americano, rigidon, escupiton, dreamy waltz had been abolished in favour of a Sousa march played in rag-time. They had danced the two-step together, and with stupor he had found himself led. It was she who determined the length of the glide, the way they should turn, how the cape of chairs should be doubled. And so they had slid along the whole floor in three steps, had whirled like tops, and his final desperate attempt to take command had resulted in a woeful lurch and tangle.
And as she stalked in her long, loose stride toward the dressing-room to readjust her saya, somewhat in distress from the Maestro's last effort, it had suddenly flashed upon him where he had seen her before. He had seen her, not in the Philippines, but in the United States, not as an individual, but as a type. He had seen her type in the co-educational colleges of his own country. She was a co-ed, that's what she was!