usually fair for a
Mexican, who spoke a little English, manipulating her lips quaintly, like
a child. He recalled her favorite expression: "My class is very fine!" She
had told him this repeatedly, enunciating the words with delicacy. She had
once said to him, commiseratingly: "You work very hard?" And when he had
confessed that his duties were onerous, she had brightened. "Much work,
much money," she had said, with the avidity of a boy who has caught a
rabbit in a trap. And Harboro had wondered where she had got such a
monstrously erroneous conception of the law of industrialism.

The picture of the whirling figures came back to him: the vapor of dust in
the room, the loud voices of men at the bar, trying to be heard above the
din of the music and the dancing. There came back to him the memory of a
drunken cowboy, nudging the violinist's elbow as he played, and shouting:
"Give us _Dixie_--give us a white man's tune"--and the look of veiled
hatred in the slumbrous eyes of the Mexican musician, who had inferred the
insult without comprehending the words.

He recalled other pictures of those nights: the Indian girls who might be
expected to yell in the midst of a dance if they had succeeded in
attracting the attention of a man who usually danced with some one else.
And there were other girls with a Spanish strain in them--girls with a
drop of blood that might have been traced back a hundred years to Madrid
or Seville or Barcelona. Small wonder if such girls felt like shrieking
too, sometimes. Not over petty victories, and with joy; but when their
hearts broke because the bells of memory called to them from away in the
barred windows of Spain, or in walled gardens, or with the shepherd lovers
of Andalusia.

If you danced with one of them you paid thirty cents at the bar and got a
drink, while the girl was given a check good for fifteen cents in the
trade of the place. The girls used to cash in their checks at the end of a
night's work at fifty cents a dozen. It wasn't quite fair; but then the
proprietor was a business man.

"My class is very fine!" The words came back to Harboro's mind. Good
God!--what had become of her? There had been a railroad man, a fellow
named Peterson, who was just gross enough to fancy her--a good chap, too,
in his way. Courageous, energetic, loyal--at least to other men. He had
occasionally thought that Peterson meant to take the poor, pretentious
creature away from the dance-halls and establis