tantly
advertising her well-shaped ankles. At the sharpest jokes she heard she
opened her luscious lips and her man-eating jaws wide enough to show two
rows of strong, even, pearl-white teeth that gave a suggestion of marble
luminousness to her darkish features.

A girl of "prestige," obviously--and why not? A solid cuff in that plump
right hand of hers, and a tongue in her head, I can tell you, when she
had a mind to use it! The wife of Pascualo _el Retor_, besides, a
good-natured fat-head who ate out of her hand and never dared peep
inside his own house; but all there, when it came to making a living out
of the sea--a pot of money, earned, every cent of it, by good, honest,
straightforward fishing.

All this Dolores knew. And that, doubtless, was why she stood there with
the self-possession of a Grand Duchess, surveying that dirty-mouthed,
dirty-clothed rabble of the Fishmarket, and perking her lips
disparagingly when some one noticed her real pearl earrings, or the
Algerian scarf, or the red-flannel petticoat from Gibraltar the Rector
had given her! In fact, the only woman she thought quite her class was
"Granny" Picores, _agueela Picores_, a veteran of the Fishmarket, a whale
of a woman, mastodontic, who cowed every policeman in the market with
one glare from her incinerating eyes, or one bellow from that cavernous
mouth of hers, the center upon which all the wrinkles in her face
converged.

"_Cristo_, when will you fools be through!" Dolores finally shouted at
the bakers, her seductive arms akimbo. And the husky young men, moving a
little slower than usual, if anything, answered in kind, but tossing
their salacious repartees in the direction of the fish-hags who lined up
around the scales with hands folded over protruding abdomens and adding
a grotesque enlargement to those already conspicuous bulges. But at last
the weighing of the fish could begin: "Hey there, me first, you----!"
"No, my turn, you----!" "You were first yesterday!" The usual morning
fight for precedence was on, waiting for arbitration by _tia_ Picores,
with her cannonading voice and formidable obscenities. But Dolores had
not joined the squabble--she even missed the place her basket held, by
rights, in the line. Something on the bridge had caught her eye; and, in
fact, over the side rails of that structure the head and shoulders of a
straggler could be seen advancing slowly, staggering along under the
weight of a heavy load.

An expression of