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"Yes," she said. "You dare say that to me?" Alexina raised her low curved eyebrows. She seldom raised them but when she did she looked like all her grandmothers. "Dare? Did you expect me to lie? Is that what you wish?" Gora clutched her muff hard against her throat.
We just crept in and were glad to be permitted to make a living. Why should they have taken any notice of us? They don't go hunting about for obscure people of possibly gentle blood. That doesn't happen anywhere in the world. You must be reasonable, my dear child. That is life, 'The World." But Gora was not gifted with that form of reasonableness. She was an excellent cook.
I should like to paint you all." "Perhaps we should have worn hats," said Gora nervously. "I didn't know I thought..." "You are just all right. Anything goes here. We wear what's becoming, what we can afford, and what is our own idea of the right thing. Nobody criticizes anybody else." "Now, this is life!" said Alexina to Aileen. "You will admit we never found anything like that before."
But, by God!" he brought down his fist on his knee "I'll beat them at their own game yet. I simply live to make a million and build a house at Burlingame. They really respect money as much as they think they don't; I've got oil to that. When I'm a rich roan they'll think of me as their equal and forget I was ever anything' else." "Well, don't speculate," said Gora uneasily.
He fixed a pay of one gora or fifteen cloths per man, as the only condition on which I should get their services; for they all declared that they had not only been to Ujiji, the place appointed by Sultan Majid and their chief before leaving Zanzibar, but that they had overstayed the time agreed upon for them to be absent on these travels namely, six months.
Gora looked at his rigid indomitable face; the face of the Pilgrim fathers, of the revolutionary statesmen, which he had inherited intact from old John Dwight who had sat in the first congress; the American classic face that is passing but still crops out as unexpectedly as the last drop from a long forgotten "tar brush," or the sly recurrent Biblical profile.
He would have accepted the alternative of bankruptcy without hesitation. But with the women of his family a man was always safe. She remembered something that Gora had once said to the same effect....Yes, she could have forgiven the theft of an outsider, for at least she would be spared this sickening suffocating sensation of contempt. It was demoralizing.
Greatly to the satisfaction of the teachers an angry emulation ensued with the gratifying result that although the girls could not pass Gora, their weekly marks were higher, and for the rest of the term they did less giggling even after school hours, and more studying. But Gora would not return for a second term.
She heard Gora moving about her mother's room and retreated into her own. She did not want to go to her mother yet nor did she care particularly to see Gora again, although she had certainly been very nice and a great comfort to them all.
Aileen did not answer and turned her sharp revealing green eyes on the eucalyptus grove which concealed Ballinger House from the vulgar gaze, and incidentally shut off a magnificent view. "I don't know whether I like Gora Dwight or not," she remarked. "Neither do I. But I admire her. She is a wonder." "Oh, yes, I admire her, and I've a notion she's got something big in her, some sort of destiny.
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