."

Cortez lived in a little square box of a brick cottage, which he had been
buying slowly for the past ten years and would probably never own. In its
parlour, gaudy with cheap, new furniture, Ramon confronted Catalina
Archulera. She was clad in a dirty calico dress, and her shoes were
covered with the dust of long tramping, as was the black shawl about her
head and shoulders. Once he had thought her pretty, but now she looked to
him about as attractive as a clod of earth.

She stood before him with downcast eyes, speechless with misery and
embarassment. At first he was utterly puzzled as to what could have
brought her there. Then with a queer mixture of anger and pity and
disgust, he noticed the swollen bulk of her healthy young body.

"Catalina! Why did you come here?" he blurted, all his self-possession
gone for a moment.

"My father sent me," she replied, as simply as though that were an
all-sufficient explanation.

"But why did you tell him {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} it was I? Why didn't you come to me first?"

"He made me tell," Catalina rolled back her sleeve and showed some blue
bruises. "He beat me," she explained without emotion.

"What did he tell you to say?"

"He told me to come to you and show you how I am.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} That is all."

Ramon swore aloud with a break in his voice. For a long moment he stood
looking at her, bewildered, disgusted. It somehow seemed to him utterly
wrong, utterly unfair that this thing should have happened, and above all
that it should have happened now. He had taken other girls, as had every
other man, but never before had any such hard luck as this befallen him.
And now, of all times!

In Catalina he felt not the faintest interest. Before him was the proof
that once he had desired her. Now that desire had vanished as completely
as his childhood.

And she was Archulera's daughter. That was the hell of it! Archulera was
the one man of all men whom he could least afford to offend. And he knew
just how hard to appease the old man would be. For among the Mexicans,
seduction is a crime which, in theory and often in practice, can be atoned
only by marriage or by the shedding of blood. Marriage is the door to
freedom for the women, but virginity is a thing greatly revered and
carefully guarded. The unmarried girl is always watched, often locked up,
and he who appropriates her to his own purpose is violating a sacred right
and offending her whole family.

In the t