drawn on carelessly over the flannel check shirt, would remark to each
other, "Here is the Senor doctor going to call on Dona Emilia. He has
got his little coat on." The inference was true. Its deeper meaning was
hidden from their simple intelligence. Moreover, they expended no
store of thought on the doctor. He was old, ugly, learned--and a little
"loco"--mad, if not a bit of a sorcerer, as the common people suspected
him of being. The little white jacket was in reality a concession
to Mrs. Gould's humanizing influence. The doctor, with his habit of
sceptical, bitter speech, had no other means of showing his profound
respect for the character of the woman who was known in the country as
the English Senora. He presented this tribute very seriously indeed;
it was no trifle for a man of his habits. Mrs. Gould felt that, too,
perfectly. She would never have thought of imposing upon him this marked
show of deference.

She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in Sulaco)
open for the dispensation of the small graces of existence. She
dispensed them with simplicity and charm because she was guided by an
alert perception of values. She was highly gifted in the art of human
intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and
in the suggestion of universal comprehension. Charles Gould (the Gould
family, established in Costaguana for three generations, always went to
England for their education and for their wives) imagined that he had
fallen in love with a girl's sound common sense like any other man,
but these were not exactly the reasons why, for instance, the whole
surveying camp, from the youngest of the young men to their mature
chief, should have found occasion to allude to Mrs. Gould's house
so frequently amongst the high peaks of the Sierra. She would have
protested that she had done nothing for them, with a low laugh and
a surprised widening of her grey eyes, had anybody told her how