nahan murmured his thanks. He was deeply amused. That he was the
representative of one of the proudest families in a State some three
hundred years old mattered nothing to these Californians of Menlo Park.
Is it catching, I wonder? he thought. If some of my English friends
should come out here five years hence, should I patronise them?
Doubtless, for it is like living on another planet. Exclusiveness is the
very scheme of its nature. It is encouraging to think that I have yet
another phase to live through.

Ila claimed his attention and kept it as they rolled down the dusty road
toward the Mark Smith place. Tiny, after a futile attempt to engage
Magdalena in conversation, devoted herself prettily to Mrs. Yorba and
talked of the plans for the summer.

Magdalena was acutely miserable. Her exaltation of spirits was a bare
memory. She hated her dowdy frock, her glaring contrast to the vivid
Ila, accentuated by that grotesque similarity of attire. She listened to
Ila's brilliant chatter and recalled her own halting phrases, her narrow
vocabulary, and wondered angrily at the conceit which had prompted her
to hope that she was overcoming her natural deficiencies.

Then she remembered that she was a Yorba, and drew herself up in lonely
pride. It was a privilege for these girls to be intimate with her, to
call her 'Lena, great as might be their social superiority over the many
in San Francisco whose names she had never heard. In her inordinate
pride of birth, in her intimate knowledge of the fact that she was the
daughter of a Californian grandee who still possessed the three hundred
thousand acres granted his fathers by the Spanish crown, she in all
honesty believed no one of these friends of her youth to be her equal,
although she never betrayed herself by so much as a lifting of the
eyebrow. She had questioned, after her loss of religion, if it were not
her duty to train down her pride, but had concluded that it was not; it
injured no one, and it was a tribute she owed her race. She liked
Trennahan the better that he had discovered and approved this pride.

XXI

Magdalena did not see Trennahan alone again; he did not ask her to ride
with him on the following morning, and left for town immediately after
breakfast. But before taking his seat in the char-a-banc he held her
hand a moment and assured her with such emphasis that he owed the great
pleasure of his visit entirely to her, that her spirits, which had been
i