Mrs. Sanderson was most winning. She had come, she said, in search of good company for a drive. She was going to Pasadena for two yards of yellow ribbon. Was it not absolutely delightful to drive eight miles for a couple of yards of ribbon? Such irresponsible pleasure made one scorn philanthropy. Why should one desire to reconcile happy Hottentots to Parisian costume? Why be perpetually annoyed with grave and difficult questions, when all could be easily dismissed in a drive after ribbon? She lamented that she had not come to San Gabriel years ago, before there was so little to prolong. She was sure native Californians were born without nerves. It rested her more than a whole year at a sanitarium to look at Mariposilla. What a perfect beauty she was, this minute, in her red frock. She must gain at once the Doña Maria's consent and come for a drive. All must make haste, for it was criminal to lose one moment of the morning.
Mariposilla, as usual, had stood unconsciously enthralled by Mrs. Sanderson's wonderful personality. The child had not understood the lady's ironic sallies, but the invitation to drive had been plain.
Instantly the absent, incomprehensible look fled from her eyes; they seemed suddenly bathed in lambent joy, while an emotional radiance enveloped her form. Resembling the beautiful little creature after which she had been named, she appeared to dart through the sunshine, then to vanish in the doorway of the somber adobe, like a lost meteor. Her marvelous, unstudied motions seemed the reflection of fickle twilight.
"Will she come back? or has she flown forever into an old legend of Spain?" Mrs. Sanderson demanded, tragically. "She will return as demure as a novitiate," I replied.
A few moments later the truth of the statement was verified. The girl's first intense emotions had been forcibly quieted by her desire to be thought conventional. When she reappeared, prepared for the drive, she walked slowly, almost stiffly—"like a lady," the Sisters at the Convent would have said.
She had donned a black jacket, that was fortunately too small and obliged to flare, exposing the little velvet girdle and a dash of scarlet that emulated coquettishly the breast of a robin. Her hair was carefully twisted into a girlish coil, while upon her head she wore a large, picturesque black hat.
During the drive to Pasadena she was ecstatically solemn, and it was only when she turned her profile to reply almost in monosyllables to the ingenious questions of Sidney that I discovered how happy she was. Her cheeks had again assumed wonderful tints, occasioned by a renewed realization of her exalted privileges, and I could see that she was flattered beyond her most daring expectation. Sidney, usually so reticent, had suddenly maddened into an animated inquisitor. I observed that he never allowed his eyes to leave the girl's face, when she replied modestly to his volley of direct questions.
Necessarily, these recollections have now come back to me slightly embellished by the events which quickly followed this initial drive. It must have been a comprehension of the common failure to note the signs of a disaster in time to obviate it, which led the ecclesiastical composers to insert in the general confession of the Prayer Book the clause in which the sinner bewails not only his actually committed sins, but his passive criminalities, born of neglect.
My conscience will ever ache with the knowledge of "things left undone" for Mariposilla. I know now that I should have explained more decidedly to the child the impassable width of the social gulf, even at the risk of her loving me less. I should have protected her against herself, by showing her the truth without palliation. I should have told her how fraudulent and glittering are the attentions of fashionable men, and warned her against the cruel disappointments of society.
Doubtless the child would have disregarded my wisdom, for wilful, rapturous youth is slow to accept experience secondhand. At the time, it appeared only right and natural that Mariposilla should take part in our daily pleasures, while, in justice to myself, it did not occur to me to doubt the good intentions of the Sandersons, until too late to overcome the complications which arose by degrees from our general intimacy.