“What idiots men are!” thought Catalina, viciously. “I suppose if I hung on his words like that he’d not hesitate a minute about being in love with me. But I’d like to see myself!”
After dinner Catalina went up to her room to brush her hair—her head ached slightly—and sit for a while by herself before the evening walk. As a rule, she was the first to be down, but to-night she had a perverse desire for Over to come or send for her. She was suddenly tired of meeting him half-way, of being the frank, almost sexless, comrade; she wanted to be sought and made much of. Miss Holmes might be a second-rate, but she was an artist, and Catalina was not above taking a leaf out of her book.
“I’d rather be a hermit and have smallpox than bother forever as she does, according to Mrs. Rothe; and flatter men—not I! But I think I should be more feminine and difficult.”
Her hands trembled a little as she burnished her hair, and once her eyes filled with tears; but she brushed them off with a scowl, and still refused to think. She had been too much with Over, and their friendship had run too smoothly for her thoughts to have been tempted to revolve about him when alone. There were times when she turned cold and then hot if he came upon her suddenly, and his touch and glance had thrilled her more than once. But she had kept it steadily before her that this was but a summer friendship and that in a short time she would be in California and he in England. It is true that her imagination supplemented the separation with a meeting in one country or the other not later than a year hence, but she had not permitted her mind to dwell upon the significance of his audible self-analysis in Madrid, holding that when a man doubted the depth of his sentiments the time had not come to take him seriously. Moreover, to speculate upon the significance of a man’s attentions was not only indelicate but put her in the class with other girls, and nothing distressed her more than to approach the average. Therefore, had she never sought to discover what lay beneath her daily pleasure in Over’s society and her matter-of-fact assumption that for the time he was hers.
Nor would she permit herself to analyze her sense of disappointment to-night. Her soul had been floating on the high, golden notes of the nightingales, and not alone; it had plunged down with a velocity that left it sick and dizzy, but as Catalina banged the large pins into her hair she still refused to demand the reason.