ock in trade to his dog. It was better so. Black,
brown or white women are alike sensitive to the language of flowers, and
the lilies he left in her basket served him more sweetly than could his
stammering tongue. Next morning, curiosity replaced hostility in her
glance, and when he left the market, her brown gaze followed him beyond
the portals. Needs not, however, to linger over the courtship.
Sufficient that color of skin does not affect the feminine trait that
forgiveness comes easier when the offense was provoked by one's own
beauty; the story goes on from the time that Andrea moved into his house
with a stock of household gear that extorted musical exclamations from
all her girl friends.

To their housekeeping Andrea contributed only her handsome body with a
contained cargo of unsuspected qualities and virtues that simply
dazzled Paul as they cropped out upon the surface. In public a Tewana
bears herself staidly, carrying a certain dignity of expression that of
itself reveals how, of old, her forbears came to place limits to the
ambition of the conquering Aztec and made even Spanish dominion little
more than an uncomfortable name. Though, through courtship, Andrea's
stern composure had shown no trace of a thaw, it yet melted like snow
under a south wind when she was once ensconced in their little home.
Moreover, she unmasked undreamed of batteries, bewildering Paul with
infinite variety of feminine complexities. She would be arch, gay,
saucy, and in the next breath fall into one of love's warm silences,
watching him with eyes of molten bronze. She taught him the love of the
tropics without transcending modesty. Also she astonished him,
negatively, by the absence of those wide differences of nature and
feeling between her and the cultured women of his own land that reading
in the primal school of fiction had led him to expect. He learned from
her that woman is always woman under any clime or epoch. The greater
strength of her physique lessened, perhaps, the vine-like tendency, yet
she clung sufficiently to satisfy the needs of his masculinity; and she
displayed the feminine unreason, at once so charming and irritating,
with sufficient coquetry to freshen her love. Her greatest charm,
however, lay in the dominant quality of brooding motherhood, the
birthright of primal women and the very essence of femininity. After one
of those sweet silences, she would steal on him from behind, and pull
his head to her bosom with