Hazlitt, brimming with the enthusiasm the day had brought him, swept on. "Think of having a jail of your own, and putting people in it when you like, being their law! Why, I dare say they'd follow him to war if he told them to, and—and sack the next plantation. It's—it's positively feudal, you know. That's the only word; all this doesn't belong to our day at all. And yet they say there's no romance left in trade!"
He stopped abruptly, for Doña Ceferina was gazing at him with round eyes. If one could picture the eyes of a ruminative cow, watching with mild curiosity a serpent which sought to charm her, one would have seen the eyes of Doña Ceferina just then. Don Raymundo smiled inscrutably, and the pause grew awkward.
Suddenly a soft voice came to Hazlitt's relief. "You remember 'feudal,' mama," it said reassuringly. "Ever so long ago, when they had knights and squires and—and gens-d'armes, and people lived in castles, and they had the Inquisition in Spain, and the friars, and—and everything. That was 'feudal.'"
Doña Ceferina sighed with relief and sipped: "Dolores has just come back from school, so she remembers all those things," she explained to Hazlitt. "I learned them once, of course, but one forgets, out here. And so you think we're feudal? I don't know, I'm sure. Of course there aren't any knights any more, or castles, but we do have the friars. Listen, señor," and she set her cup on a little table, to give freedom to her hands, and plunged into the story of the latest exaction by the local representative of the hierarchy of the Philippines.
No one minded her much. Her husband sat with half-closed eyes and puffed at his cigarette, Dolores turned to her window and gazed down on her little world as it went to sleep, and Hazlitt's eyes persisted in wandering to the girlish figure, glowing in a belated, ruddy shaft of light. Decidedly, the talkative woman on the beach had shown some discrimination in placing Señorita Dolores on the pinnacle of beauty. Suddenly Hazlitt became aware that Doña Ceferina's tale was told, and that her talk had taken a more personal turn.
"Dolores gazed down on her little world as it went to sleep."
"It's so good to have one from our own world to talk to again," she said enthusiastically. "One gets lonely here, with only natives for neighbors. I tremble to think what my existence would have been, after I came back from school, if Don Raymundo had not been here to rescue me." She smiled radiantly at her black and white spouse, as if to include him in the conversation, but he only drew long on his cigarette and puffed the smoke very deliberately toward the ceiling. Hazlitt's eyes wandered to the window again, and Doña Ceferina's followed them.
"Isn't she beautiful?" she whispered.