("Say!" Sarella asked herself, "what's coming?")
Two of the cowboys were coming—had come in fact. They appeared at that moment round the corner of the house, ready for supper.
"So," one of them said, with rather loud irritation, evidently concluding a story, "my dad married her, and I have a step-ma younger than myself—"
CHAPTER XVIII.
Everyone on the range, from its owner down to old Jack, considered that Gore made much more way after his trip to Denver. Mariquita, it was decided, had, as it were, awakened to him. It was believed that she and he saw more of each other, and that she liked his company.
Sarella thought things were going so well that they had much better be left to themselves, and this view she strongly impressed upon Don Joaquin. He had gradually come to hold a higher opinion of her sense; at first he had been attracted entirely by her beauty. Her aunt had not been remarkable for intelligence, and he had not thought the niece could be expected to be wiser than her departed elder.
Sarella, on the other hand, did not think her admirer quite so sensible as he really was. That he was shrewd and successful in business, she knew, but was the less impressed that his methods had been slow and unhurried. To her eastern ideas there was nothing imposing (though extremely comfortable) in a moderate wealth accumulated by thirty years of patient work and stingy expenditure. But she was sure he did not in the least understand his own daughter, in whom she (who did not understand her any better than she would have understood Dante's Divina Commedia) saw nothing at all difficult to understand. The truth was that Don Joaquin had never understood any woman; without imagination, he could understand no sex but his own—and his experience of women was of the narrowest. Nevertheless, he was nearer to a sort of rough, nebulous perception of his daughter than was Sarella herself.
His saying that Mariquita would not "consider" Gore's good looks, a remark that Sarella thought merely ridiculous, was an illustration of this. In his explicit mind, in his conscious attitude towards Mariquita, he assumed that it was her business and duty to respect him. He was her parent, so placed by God, and he had a great and sincere reverence for such Divine appointments as placed himself in a condition of superiority. (Insubordination or insolence in the cowboys would have gravely and honestly scandalized him). All the same, in an inner mind that he never consulted, and whose instruction he was far from seeking, he knew that his daughter was a higher creature than himself; all he knew that he knew was that a young girl was necessarily more innocent and pure than an elderly man could be (he himself was no profligate); that in fact all women were more religious than men, and that it behooved them to be so; nature made it easier for them.
He had after deliberate consideration decided that it would be convenient and suitable that his daughter should marry Gore; the young man, he was sure, wished it, and, while the circumstances in which she was placed held little promise of a wide choice of husbands for her, he would, in Don Joaquin's opinion, make a quite suitable husband. To do him justice, he would never have manoeuvred to bring Gore into a marriage with Mariquita, had he appeared indifferent to the girl, or had he seemed in any way unfit.