Theo Dene talked of Carmen Gaylor, telling stories she had heard of the
rich widow from people whose acquaintance she had first made at Del Monte.
"I am longing to meet the woman," she said; "I think she must be an
interesting character, typically Spanish, or Mexican--or, anyhow, not
American--from what they all say. A beauty--vain and jealous, and a
fearful temper. I shouldn't like to interfere with a woman of that sort in
what she thought her 'rights,' should you?"
[Illustration: "_They weren't trees, but people, either nymphs or
witches_"]
"One can't interfere with a person one has never met, can one?" Angela
remarked, pretending not to understand.
"Maybe not, in real life," Theo agreed. "I'm always losing myself in my
books, and forgetting that the world outside isn't like _my_ world, made
of romance. But you can understand, can't you; here where it's so
beautiful that even a _married woman_--who has, of course, left love far
behind her in Europe--must feel some faint yearning to be the heroine of a
romance?"
Princess di Sereno wondered why she had ever been nice to Theo in Rome.
XVIII
LA DONNA E MOBILE
Angela stood at her hotel window, looking down over the gilded hills and
purple valleys of the most romantic city in America--San Francisco, the
port of adventure; away to the Golden Gate, where the sea poured in a
flood of gold under a sea of rosy fog--a foaming, rushing sea of sunset
cloud, beneath a high dome of fire away to the fortified islands and to
Mount Tamalpais.
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