s passion thrown!
Through all my frame steal roots of pure desire:
My dreams are blooms that shake and shine like fire.

MAURICE THOMPSON

FELIPA.

Christine and I found her there. She was a small, dark-skinned,
yellow-eyed child, the offspring of the ocean and the heats, tawny,
lithe and wild, shy yet fearless--not unlike one of the little brown
deer that bounded through the open reaches of the pine barren behind the
house. She did not come to us--we came to her: we loomed into her life
like genii from another world, and she was partly afraid and partly
proud of us. For were we not her guests?--proud thought!--and, better
still, were we not women? "I have only seen three women in all my life,"
said Felipa, inspecting us gravely, "and I like women. I am a woman too,
although these clothes of the son of Pedro make me appear as a boy: I
wear them on account of the boat and the hauling in of the fish. The son
of Pedro being dead at a convenient age, and his clothes fitting me,
what would you have? It was manifestly a chance not to be despised. But
when I am grown I shall wear robes long and beautiful like the
senora's." The little creature was dressed in a boy's suit of dark-blue
linen, much the worse for wear, and torn.

"If you are a girl, why do you not mend your clothes?" I said.

"Do you mend, senora?"

"Certainly: all women sew and mend."

"The other lady?"

Christine laughed as she lay at ease upon the brown carpet of pine
needles, warm and aromatic after the tropic day's sunshine. "The child
has divined me already, Catherine," she said.

Christine was a tall, lissome maid, with an unusually long stretch of
arm, long sloping shoulders and a long fair throat: her straight hair
fell to her knees when unbound, and its clear flaxen hue had not one
shade of gold, as her clear gray eyes had not one shade of blue. Her
small, straight, rose-leaf lips parted over small, dazzlingly white
teeth, and the outline of her face in profile reminded you of an etching
in its distinctness, although it was by no means perfect according to
the rules of art. Still, what a comfort it was, after the blurred
outlines and smudged profiles many of us possess--seen to best
advantage, I think, in church on Sundays, crowned with flower-decked
bonnets, listening calmly serene to favorite ministers, unconscious of
noses! When Christine had finished her laugh--and she never hurried
anything, but took the full taste of it-