That Miss Jackson promptly decided that Mariquita was stupid, he had seen plainly; and he had not had the consolation of knowing that she was stupid herself. She was, he knew, wise enough in her generation, and by no means vacant of will or purpose. But she was, he saw, stupid in thinking her young hostess so. Slow, in some senses, Mariquita might be; not swift of impression, though tenacious of impression received, nor willing to be quick in jumping to shrewd (unflattering) conclusion, yet likely to stick hard to an even harsh conclusion once formed. These, however, were slight matters. What was not slight was the sense she gave him of nobility: her simplicity itself noble, her complete acquiescence in her own complete ignorance of experience--her innate, unargued conviction of the little consequence of much, often highly desired, experience. Of the world she knew nothing, socially, geographically even. Of women her knowledge was (as soon he discovered) a mere memory, a memory of a group of nuns--for her other companions at the Convent had been children. Of men she knew only her father and his cowboys. And no one, he perceived, knew her. But Gore did not believe her mind vacant. That rare quality could not have been in her beauty if it had been empty. Yet--there was something greater than her mind behind her face. The shape of that perception had entered instantly into his own mind; and the perception grew and deepened daily, with every time he was in her presence, with every recollection of her in absence. Her mind might be a garden unsown. But behind her face was the light of a lamp not waiting to be lit, but already lighted (he surmised) at the first coming of conscious existence, and burning steadily ever since. Whose hand had lighted it he did not know yet, though he knew that the lamp, shining behind her face, her mere beauty, was her soul. Her father was not mistaken in his notion that the young man regarded the girl to whom he addressed so little of direct speech, with a veneration that disconcerted Don Joaquin and was condemned by him as out of place. Not that he, of course, found fault with _respect_: absence of that he would grimly have resented; but a _culte_, like Gore's, a reverence literally devout, seemed to the old half-Indian Latin, high-falutin, unreal: and Don Joaquin abhorred unrealities. Probably the young man condemned the old as hide-bound in obtuseness of perception in reference to his daughter. As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout she may well have seemed to him. If so, some inkling of the fact would surely penetrate the old horse-raiser's inner, taciturn, but acutely watchful consciousness. His hide was by no means too thick for that. And, if so again, that perception would not enhance his appreciation of the critic. Elderly fathers are not universally more flattered by an exalted valuation of their daughters than by an admiring estimation of themselves.