Through all my frame steal roots of pure desire:
My dreams are blooms that shake and shine like fire.
MAURICE THOMPSON
FELIPA.
Christine and I found her there. She was a small, dark-skinned, yellow-eyed child, the offspring of the ocean and the heats, tawny, lithe and wild, shy yet fearless—not unlike one of the little brown deer that bounded through the open reaches of the pine barren behind the house. She did not come to us—we came to her: we loomed into her life like genii from another world, and she was partly afraid and partly proud of us. For were we not her guests?—proud thought!—and, better still, were we not women? "I have only seen three women in all my life," said Felipa, inspecting us gravely, "and I like women. I am a woman too, although these clothes of the son of Pedro make me appear as a boy: I wear them on account of the boat and the hauling in of the fish. The son of Pedro being dead at a convenient age, and his clothes fitting me, what would you have? It was manifestly a chance not to be despised. But when I am grown I shall wear robes long and beautiful like the señora's." The little creature was dressed in a boy's suit of dark-blue linen, much the worse for wear, and torn.
"If you are a girl, why do you not mend your clothes?" I said.
"Do you mend, señora?"
"Certainly: all women sew and mend."
"The other lady?"