ight. He was asking her for a sign, any kind of
sign,--ten years in the Soudan entitles them to a sign,--and Zena was
plucking a white rose, just one, from her hair, when she would hear her
father's step on the piazza and make a grab for the Pioneers of Tecumseh
Township, and start reading it like mad.

She was always, as I say, being rescued and being borne away, and being
parted, and reaching out her arms to France and to Spain, and
saying good-bye forever to Valladolid or the old grey towers of
Hohenbranntwein.

And I don't mean that she was in the least exceptional or romantic,
because all the girls in Mariposa were just like that. An Algerian
corsair could have come into the town and had a dozen of them for the
asking, and as for a wounded English officer,--well, perhaps it's better
not to talk about it outside or the little town would become a regular
military hospital.

Because, mind you, the Mariposa girls are all right. You've only to look
at them to realize that. You see, you can get in Mariposa a print dress
of pale blue or pale pink for a dollar twenty that looks infinitely
better than anything you ever see in the city,--especially if you can
wear with it a broad straw hat and a background of maple trees and the
green grass of a tennis court. And if you remember, too, that these are
cultivated girls who have all been to the Mariposa high school and can
do decimal fractions, you will understand that an Algerian corsair would
sharpen his scimitar at the very sight of them.

Don't think either that they are all dying to get married; because they
are not. I don't say they wouldn't take an errant knight, or a buccaneer
or a Hungarian refugee, but for the ordinary marriages of ordinary
people they feel nothing but a pitying disdain. So it is that each one
of them in due time marries an enchanted prince and goes to live in one
of the little enchanted houses in the lower part of the town.

I don't know whether you know it, but you can rent an enchanted house
in Mariposa for eight dollars a month, and some of the most completely
enchanted are the cheapest. As for the enchanted princes, they find
them in the strangest places, where you never expected to see them,
working--under a spell, you understand,--in drug-stores and printing
offices, and even selling things in shops. But to be able to find them
you have first to read ever so many novels about Sir Galahad and the
Errant Quest and that sort of thing.

Nat