, in spirits, he seemed much younger than his
years. To his detriment nothing could be said that could not have been
said of the other young men of his class in his country. But the girl
was not in love with the young man of that class, nor with her
country.

Her brother had been sacrificed in what to her had seemed but a
squalid struggle for place between two greedy politicians; her father,
for the very reason that he had served his country loyally,
faithfully, and was, in consequence, beloved by the people, had been
caged like a wild animal. She had no love for her native land. She
distrusted and feared it.

Night after night, as she paced the walk along the cliff where the
waves broke at her feet, she shuddered to think of returning to that
land, only sixty miles from her, that had robbed her of so much that
had made life beautiful; of all, up to the present, that had made it
happy. She wished never to see it again. Could her father have been
returned to her she would have rejoiced that they were exiles. And, as
she distrusted the country, she distrusted the men of the country, at
least those of the class to which Vega belonged. She knew them well,
the born orators, born fighters, born conspirators. To scheme, to
plot, to organize against the authority of the moment was in their
blood.

If she thought of a possible husband, and, in a country where a girl
marries at fifteen, and where her first, if not her only duty in life,
is to marry, it would have been surprising if she had not, the man she
considered as a husband was not a Venezuelan. For their deference to
women, for their courtesy to each other, for their courage as shown in
their campaigns, for their appreciation of art, of letters, of music,
she greatly admired her countrymen; but that they themselves created
nothing, that they scorned labor and all those who labored, made them,
to Inez, intolerable.

That she was half an American of the North was to her a source of
secret pride. With satisfaction she remembered young men she had known
during the summers on the North Shore and Cape Cod, the young men who,
during the first of the week, toiled and sweltered in their offices,
and who, when the week-end came, took their pleasures strenuously, in
exercise and sport. She liked to remember that her American and
English devotees had treated her as a comrade, as an intelligent,
thinking creature. They had not talked to her exclusively of the
beauty of her eyes,