of prostitution, to which, in their eyes, women belonged.
But they were bullies, and, as bullies, cowards. And like so many Mexicans of that class, soft and suicidal towards themselves. They made friends with judges and generals. They rode about in resplendent charro dress, and had motor-loads of rather doubtful visitors.
Against their soft, sensuous brutality Teresa could do nothing, and she knew it. They were all soft and sensual, or sensuous, handsome in their way, open-handed, careless, but bullies, with no fear at the middle of them.
“Make yourself desirable, and get a husband for yourself,” they said to her.
In their eyes, her greatest crime was that she did not make herself desirable to men of their sort. That she had never had a man, that she was not married, made her almost repulsive to them. What was woman for, but for loose, soft, prostitutional sex?
“Do you want to wear the trousers?” they jeered at her. “No, Señorita! Not while there are two men on the place, you are not going to wear the trousers. No, Señorita! The trousers, the men wear them. The women keep under their petticoats that which they are women for.”
Teresa was used to these insults. But they made her soul burn.
“You, do you want to be an American woman?” they said to her. “Go off to America, then, and bob your hair and wear breeches. Buy a ranch there, and get a husband to take your orders. Go!”
She went to her lawyers, but they held up their hands. And she went to Ramón, whom she had known since she was a child.
It would have meant a hopeless and ruinous law-suit, to get the brothers ejected from