To their housekeeping Andrea contributed only her handsome body with a contained cargo of unsuspected qualities and virtues that simply dazzled Paul as they cropped out upon the surface. In public a Tewana bears herself staidly, carrying a certain dignity of expression that of itself reveals how, of old, her forbears came to place limits to the ambition of the conquering Aztec and made even Spanish dominion little more than an uncomfortable name. Though, through courtship, Andrea's stern composure had shown no trace of a thaw, it yet melted like snow under a south wind when she was once ensconced in their little home. Moreover, she unmasked undreamed of batteries, bewildering Paul with infinite variety of feminine complexities. She would be arch, gay, saucy, and in the next breath fall into one of love's warm silences, watching him with eyes of molten bronze. She taught him the love of the tropics without transcending modesty. Also she astonished him, negatively, by the absence of those wide differences of nature and feeling between her and the cultured women of his own land that reading in the primal school of fiction had led him to expect. He learned from her that woman is always woman under any clime or epoch. The greater strength of her physique lessened, perhaps, the vine-like tendency, yet she clung sufficiently to satisfy the needs of his masculinity; and she displayed the feminine unreason, at once so charming and irritating, with sufficient coquetry to freshen her love. Her greatest charm, however, lay in the dominant quality of brooding motherhood, the birthright of primal women and the very essence of femininity. After one of those sweet silences, she would steal on him from behind, and pull his head to her bosom with such a squeeze as a loving mother gives her son. Yet, under even this mood, her laughter lay close to the surface, and nothing tapped its merry flow quicker than Paul's Spanish. Picking up the language haphazard, he had somehow learned to apply the verb _tumblar_ to describe the pouring out of coffee, and he clung to it after correction with a persistence that surely inhered in his dogged German blood. "_Tumbarlo el cafe_!" he would say, and she would repeat it, faithfully mimicking his accent. "Tumble out the coffee!" following it with peals of laughter. Or, turning up a saucy face, she would ask, "Shall I tumble out more coffee?" and again the laughter which came as readily at her own misfit attempts at English. These, few and simple, were learned of Bachelder's woman, and sprung on Paul as surprises on his return from visiting the mining properties, which required his frequent presence. For instance, slipping to his knee on one such occasion, with the great heart of her pulsing against him, she sighed: "I love thee, lovest thou me?"