Page:Spider Boy (1928).pdf/185

 miss, hanging thus till eventually they were tossed into the pot, did not incline Ambrose towards assenting to Marna Frost's cordial invitation to assist at lunch on a future occasion with some of the more friendly of her protégés. A casual word more than betrayed his feeling.

But they are clean! Marna declared passionately. I tell you that they belong to the earth and the earth belongs to them. As for the rest, bathing is the curse of civilization. We wash our personalities out in the morning tub.

Some of the handsomer men, picturesque with their hair bobbed in front and at the sides, and tied in a peculiar knot at the back, their gay-coloured garments, and their high, red deer-skin moccasins, fastened with buttons of wrought silver, in form so like the shoes of renaissance Italian pages, gave him a more favourable view of the aborigines. The rows of adobe huts with the glamorous inhabitants standing before them, or sitting, cross-legged, drilling turquoise, the great rounded kivas with their projecting ladders, leading into the depths, silhouetted against the blue sky, and particularly the Spanish church with two enchanting piebald horses painted on the wall of the balcony that adorned the façade, completely won his heart, but recently disordered by so many