Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/240

228 of the childhood. But the time change. One grows old. One has no son" and he shrugged his shoulders in the implication that his judgment alone had dictated this move. The house they occupied was on a side street downtown, somewhere among the older residences that nobody knew. A few of the older families tried to keep track of them by means of occasional and spasmodic visits: but, amiable as she was, Doña Cazadero had very little to offer. Outside her traditional setting she was nothing very much. Her apparent placid content with her chocolate caramels and her yellow novel, her rocking chair and her dressing sack, her slow, afternoon amble down Main Street, robbed the situation of that sort of loyalty that springs from pity. She seemed to be getting on all right, so why bore oneself? Don Vincente was rarely at home. He had no content at all with his lot; though no one was permitted to know it. His pride was wounded to the death; a bitter, smothered rage burned in his heart against the American race and the smart tricks by which he thought they had despoiled him. Colonel Peyton was almost the only man he excepted from this hatred; and Colonel Peyton he avoided sedulously for the simple reason that his pride and his conscience were both torn over the great sums of money he knew now he could never repay. He consorted only with members of his own race, frequenting much of the time wine halls to the west of Main Street.

The Fremont and San Antonio hotels had been transferred to a syndicate and were being run efficiently by a professional manager. They were good hotels. Tourists visiting them for the first time went away loud in their praises. The staff was excellent and polite, the food good and abundant, the rooms clean; and the arrangements for the comfort and amusement and information of the guests rather unusually well thought and managed. Yet some of the old timers, like our friends Saxon and George Scott or Marcus Oberman, would shake their heads and regret the "good old days." They could not tell what they missed. Indeed, cross-questioned laughingly, they had to confess that there had been many desirable innovations. But it was different, somehow. What they really missed was the intimate, personal touch of Colonel Peyton's affectionate minis-