The presence of the little Mexican in the school did much to ameliorate Adelle's lonely lot this second year. She formed a connecting link of a sort between her and the rest of her schoolmates, who liked the foreigner. Diane reported fully to Adelle what the other girls were doing,--how Betty Langton was in love with an actor and for this reason went to New York almost every week on one excuse or another; how the two Californians, Irene and Sadie Paul, had a party in their room the night before, with wine, much wine. Diane shook her head wonderingly over all these doings of "the Americans." American girls seemed to her all "queer," and, though she did not say so, rather vulgar and underbred. Oddly enough she put Adelle apart in this sweeping judgment, for she was not able to appreciate Adelle's common accent and primitive manners. Adelle did not snub nor condescend nor do "naughty" things, and so, from the Mexican's standard, a simple and somewhat antiquated one, Adelle was a lady. Diane concluded that she must be poor and for that reason the other girls treated her badly. To be poor was no disgrace in the eyes of the Mexican. Many of the best people she had known, including her Spanish relatives, were dreadfully poor, but none the less to be considered. Poverty was a matter of God's will in the delightful Latin sense of the word, not a matter of inherited personal disgrace as in a free, Anglo-Saxon democracy. "I do not like your America," she said gravely to Adelle after she had been a couple of months in the school. "Not to live in always when I am married." "What's the matter with America?" Adelle asked. "It is all money, money," the little Mexican replied. "You come to see nothing in your heart but dollars, dollars, dollars. It makes the heart heavy." Adelle, who had never looked at the world in this light, thought Diane a little "queer." Nevertheless they were good friends as school-girl friendships go and consoled each other for what they lacked in their common environment.