These, however, were slight matters. What was not slight was the sense she gave him of nobility: her simplicity itself noble, her complete acquiescence in her own complete ignorance of experience—her innate, unargued conviction of the little consequence of much, often highly desired, experience.
Of the world she knew nothing, socially, geographically even. Of women her knowledge was (as soon he discovered) a mere memory, a memory of a group of nuns—for her other companions at the Convent had been children. Of men she knew only her father and his cowboys. And no one, he perceived, knew her.
But Gore did not believe her mind vacant. That rare quality could not have been in her beauty if it had been empty. Yet—there was something greater than her mind behind her face. The shape of that perception had entered instantly into his own mind; and the perception grew and deepened daily, with every time he was in her presence, with every recollection of her in absence.
Her mind might be a garden unsown. But behind her face was the light of a lamp not waiting to be lit, but already lighted (he surmised) at the first coming of conscious existence, and burning steadily ever since. Whose hand had lighted it he did not know yet, though he knew that the lamp, shining behind her face, her mere beauty, was her soul. Her father was not mistaken in his notion that the young man regarded the girl to whom he addressed so little of direct speech, with a veneration that disconcerted Don Joaquin and was condemned by him as out of place. Not that he, of course, found fault with respect: absence of that he would grimly have resented; but a culte, like Gore's, a reverence literally devout, seemed to the old half-Indian Latin, high-falutin, unreal: and Don Joaquin abhorred unrealities.
Probably the young man condemned the old as hide-bound in obtuseness of perception in reference to his daughter. As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout she may well have seemed to him. If so, some inkling of the fact would surely penetrate the old horse-raiser's inner, taciturn, but acutely watchful consciousness. His hide was by no means too thick for that. And, if so again, that perception would not enhance his appreciation of the critic.
Elderly fathers are not universally more flattered by an exalted valuation of their daughters than by an admiring estimation of themselves.
To himself, indeed, Gore was perfectly respectful. And he had to admit that the stranger learned his work well and did it well—better than the cowboys whom Don Joaquin was not given to indulge in neglect or slackness.
He had a notion that the cowboys considered Gore too respectable—as to which their master held his judgment in suspense. In a possible son-in-law respectability, unless quite suspiciously excessive, would not be much "out of place"—not that Don Joaquin admitted more than the bare possibility, till he had fuller certainty as to the stranger's circumstances and antecedents, what he called his "conditions." Given satisfactory conditions, Mariquita's father began to be conscious that Gore as a possible son-in-law might simplify a certain course of his own.
For Sarella continued steadily to commend herself to his ideas. He held her to be beautiful in the extreme, and her prudence he secretly acclaimed as admirable. That she was penniless he was quite aware, and he had a constant, sincere affection for money; but, unless penniless, such a lovely creature could hardly have been found on the prairie, or be expected to remain there; an elderly rich husband, he considered, would have much more hold on a young and lovely wife if she were penniless.
That the young woman had expensive tastes he did not suppose, and he had great and not ungrounded confidence in his own power of repression of any taste not to his mind, should any supervene.