were
doing,--how Betty Langton was in love with an actor and for this reason
went to New York almost every week on one excuse or another; how the two
Californians, Irene and Sadie Paul, had a party in their room the night
before, with wine, much wine. Diane shook her head wonderingly over all
these doings of "the Americans." American girls seemed to her all
"queer," and, though she did not say so, rather vulgar and underbred.
Oddly enough she put Adelle apart in this sweeping judgment, for she was
not able to appreciate Adelle's common accent and primitive manners.
Adelle did not snub nor condescend nor do "naughty" things, and so, from
the Mexican's standard, a simple and somewhat antiquated one, Adelle was
a lady. Diane concluded that she must be poor and for that reason the
other girls treated her badly. To be poor was no disgrace in the eyes of
the Mexican. Many of the best people she had known, including her
Spanish relatives, were dreadfully poor, but none the less to be
considered. Poverty was a matter of God's will in the delightful Latin
sense of the word, not a matter of inherited personal disgrace as in a
free, Anglo-Saxon democracy.

"I do not like your America," she said gravely to Adelle after she had
been a couple of months in the school. "Not to live in always when I am
married."

"What's the matter with America?" Adelle asked.

"It is all money, money," the little Mexican replied. "You come to see
nothing in your heart but dollars, dollars, dollars. It makes the heart
heavy."

Adelle, who had never looked at the world in this light, thought Diane a
little "queer." Nevertheless they were good friends as school-girl
friendships go and consoled each other for what they lacked in their
common environment.

Another event of this new year was perhaps even more momentous to Adelle
than the arrival of the little Mexican, and that was the visit paid to
her shortly after her sixteenth birthday by one of the trust company's
officers. It was Mr. Ashly Crane--the new trust officer, in fact--who
rode up the winding avenue from the river road in one of the noisy,
new-fangled motors that announced itself from afar. Mr. Gardiner, it
seemed, had been retired from his position as trust officer and was no
longer to be the human symbol of Adelle's wardship to the trust company.
The new trust officer had not of design chosen the occasion of the
ward's birthday to pay her a visit. Happening to be in the neighboring
ci