, facing them; and her full figure, the
grave oval of her face with full red lips, made her look more mature
than Mrs. Gould, with her mobile expression and small, erect person
under a slightly swaying sunshade.

Whenever possible Antonia attended her father; her recognized devotion
weakened the shocking effect of her scorn for the rigid conventions
regulating the life of Spanish-American girlhood. And, in truth, she was
no longer girlish. It was said that she often wrote State papers from
her father's dictation, and was allowed to read all the books in
his library. At the receptions--where the situation was saved by the
presence of a very decrepit old lady (a relation of the Corbelans),
quite deaf and motionless in an armchair--Antonia could hold her own in
a discussion with two or three men at a time. Obviously she was not the
girl to be content with peeping through a barred window at a cloaked
figure of a lover ensconced in a doorway opposite--which is the correct
form of Costaguana courtship. It was generally believed that with her
foreign upbringing and foreign ideas the learned and proud Antonia would
never marry--unless, indeed, she married a foreigner from Europe or
North America, now that Sulaco seemed on the point of being invaded by
all the world.

CHAPTER THREE

When General Barrios stopped to address Mrs. Gould, Antonia raised
negligently her hand holding an open fan, as if to shade from the sun
her head, wrapped in a light lace shawl. The clear gleam of her blue
eyes gliding behind the black fringe of eyelashes paused for a moment
upon her father, then travelled further to the figure of a young man
of thirty at most, of medium height, rather thick-set, wearing a light
overcoat. Bearing down with the open palm of his hand upon the knob of
a flexible cane, he had been looking on from a distance; but directly
he saw himself noticed, he approached quietly and put his elbow over the
door of the landau.

The shirt collar, cut low in the neck, the big bow of his cravat,
the style of his clothing, from the round hat to the varnished shoes,
suggested an idea of French elegance; but otherwise he was the very type
of a fair Spanish creole. The fluffy moustache and the short, curly,
golden beard did not conceal his lips, rosy, fresh, almost pouting in
expression. His full, round face was of that warm, healthy creole white
which is never tanned by its native sunshine. Martin Decoud was seldom
exposed to the Co