out her impossible threat and eloped with her young man.
At the New York home of the Hodges, where Carmelita spent her vacations, she had opportunities to learn more about the American notions of romance contrasted with parentally supervised love of the Spanish type. For while during her first year at the College of Saint Isabella she was just an awkwardly pretty girl of sixteen and rather an incumbrance upon Lucy's social activities while at the Hodge house, during the next three years she underwent a characteristically rapid Spanish maturing. Lucy now found that she had at her disposal an unusually attractive young lady of a warm brunette beauty. She was a welcome addition to the Hodge entourage.
Within the hulking brownstone of the Hodge home on Riverside Drive, and the twenty-room Hodge "cottage" at Newport, Carmelita met men who were neither to be treated as servants nor to be feared. At first she was flattered at the attentions they paid her. But as she grew older and more sophisticated through the lore retailed to her by her school chums and through the worldly observations of Lucy and through her own swiftly developing savoir faire in her relations with men, a new Carmelita flowered—a Carmelita of radiant beauty, soft black
