"It is merely the barrier of sex. A man can know a woman fairly well, because her life, consequently the interests which mould her mind and conceive her thoughts, are more or less simple. A man's life is so complex, his nature so inevitably the sum and work of it of it lies so far outside of woman's sphere, his mind spiked with a thousand magnets, each pointing to a different possibility,--that she would need divine wisdom to comprehend him in his entirety, even if he made her a diagram of every cell in his brain,--which he never would, out of consideration for both her and his own vanity. But within certain restrictions there can be a magnificent sense of comradeship." "But a woman, I think, would never be happy with that something in the man always beyond her grasp,--that something which she could be nothing to. She would be more jealous of that independence of her in man than of another woman." "That was pure insight," he said. "You could not know that." "No," she said, "I had not thought of it before." I had made a martyr of myself on a three-cornered stone at the entrance of the canon, waiting to dueña them out. "Never will I do this again!" I exclaimed, with that virtue born of discomfort, as they came in sight. "My dearest Eustaquia," said Diego, kissing my hand gallantly, "thou hast given me pleasure so often, most charming and clever of women, thou hast but added one new art to thy overflowing store." We mounted almost immediately upon returning, and I was alone with Chonita for a moment. "Do you realize that you are playing with fire?" I said, warningly. "Estenega is a dangerous man; the most successful man with women I have ever known." "I do not deny his power," she said. "But I am safe, for the many reasons thou knowest of. And, being safe, why should I deny myself the pleasure of talking to him? I shall never meet his like again. Let me live for a little while." "Ay, but do not live too hard! It hurts down into the core and marrow." XX. While we were eating supper, a dozen Indian girls were gathered about a table in one of the large rooms behind the house, busily engaged in blowing out the contents of several hundred eggs and filling the hollowed shells with cologne, flour, tinsel, bright scraps of paper. Each egg-was then sealed with white wax, and ready for the cascaron frolic of the evening.