"The legitimate ambition of every woman," I concluded for her.
"Si, Senora," she answered, laughing in spite of herself.
"But," I argued, "you must have met other American girls whose interest was not solely centered in the fine art of flirtation."
"I understood them--those you speak of, even less!" said Mercedes guilelessly. "My roommate was such a one. She wanted to be an engineer just fancy! And she was so pretty too!"
"An engineer!" I ejaculated, for even to my American mind this was an unusual ambition for my sex to harbor. "And she had no use for men, too?" I asked.
"That was just it," said Mercedes, in obvious wonderment. "She had any number of men friends: corresponded with them, saw them at dances: they even called upon her at college. But a flirt she was not. They were her friends, she said. And she was like another boy with them. I went to her home once, a little town in Massachusetts, and I could not understand her at all. She was like a sister to her mother, a son to her father, and a comrade to her dance-partners. It was too amazing!"
There was the whole thing in a nutshell, I thought. She could understand but not condone the promiscuous flirtations of her American sisters: but the girl who was comrade to a man, and friend, and who looked on him as such, and not as an extra "scalp" or a possible husband, was beyond her comprehension.
"But," I argued, "returning to the butterflies, surely, Mercedes, you have quite as much freedom now as any American girl. And, forgive me, my dear, but you employ it in much the same manner."
Her glance was mischievous and rather child-like.
"That has only been since my return home," she said. "Mother is not pleased, but Father says, 'let her go ahead.' And--as to what you say, I am trying very hard to be American now."
"Not the comrade sort, such as your mechanical roommate?" I suggested.
"But most of the men I meet are Cubans," she stated. "Do you think _they_ would understand it--if I could be like that little Mary Adams?"
"Of course not," she said, answering her own question. "They would laugh and shrug--and be, perhaps, disagreeable. They can accept such a manner in an American girl. They do not like it, or comprehend it, but some of them have learned their lesson. And they must respect it. But--in a Spanish girl--it would be unthinkable. Besides," she added frankly, "I couldn't--"