there had been that
trip to the church, and the playing of the march; and this fact placed
Sylvia considerably above certain obscure women in the town who were not
under public condemnation, but whose status was even more hopeless--who
were regarded as entirely negligible.

The wife of Jesus Mendoza was one of these. She was an American woman,
married to a renegade Mexican who was notoriously evil. I have referred to
Mendoza as a man who went about partly concealed in his own cloud of
cigarette smoke, who looked at nothing in particular and who was an active
politician of a sort. He had his place in the male activities of the town;
but you wouldn't have known he had a wife from anything there was in his
conversation or in his public appearances. Nobody remembered ever to have
seen the two together. She remained indoors in all sorts of weather save
when she had marketing to do, and then she looked neither to left nor
right. Her face was like a mask. She had been an unfortunate creature when
Mendoza married her; and she was perhaps thankful to have even a low-caste
Mexican for a husband, and a shelter, and money enough to pay the
household expenses.

That her life could not have been entirely complete, even from her own way
of thinking, was evidenced by the fact that at last she came to call on
Sylvia in the house on the Quemado Road.

Sylvia received her with reticence and with a knowing look. She was not
pleased that Mrs. Mendoza had decided to call. She realized just what her
own status was in the eyes of this woman, who had assumed that she might
be a welcome visitor.

But Sylvia's outlook upon life, as has been seen, was distorted in many
ways; and she was destined to realize that she must form new conclusions
as to this woman who had come to see her in her loneliness.

Mrs. Mendoza was tactful and kind. She assumed nothing, save that Sylvia
was not very thoroughly acquainted in the town, and that as she had had
her own house now for a month or two, she would expect people to be
neighborly. She discussed the difficulties of housekeeping so far from the
source of supplies. She was able, incidentally, to give Sylvia a number of
valuable hints touching these difficulties. She discussed the subject of
Mexican help without self-consciousness. During her call it developed that
she was fond of music--that in fact she was (or had been) a musician. And
for the first time since Sylvia's marriage there was music on the pian