Then, at sight of the maid's sly and mocking face, Enrique would feel his countenance lengthen with sadness. His eyes would grow dim with grief and humility, like those of a discharged servant. But then, not being quite able to give up the illusion that had brought him there, he would say:

"Well, all right, if that's how it is. Tell her I called, and say I'll be back to-morrow."

As he went down the stairs, very sadly, that idea of his own inferiority which had wounded him on the night he had been introduced to Alicia once more overcame him. Yes, he was beaten at the start. He was inept and worthless. What could he offer her? Not money, since he was poor; nor fame, since he was not a noted artist; nor yet could he bring her gayety and joy, for whatever of these he had until now possessed in his sentimental, introspective soul, had been taken away from him by Alicia's indifference.

Many days, at nightfall, the student went to Calle Mayor and stood in front of the jeweler's window where he could see the sparkling of that magnificent emerald necklace that Alicia had told him about. Now he would walk up and down the street, wrapped in his cloak with a certain worldly aplomb; now he would pause to look at the shop, whose electric lights flooded the pa.s.sers-by under a rain of brilliancy. He would stand a long time in front of the window, enthralled by the spell of the bleeding rubies, the topazes which burned like wounds, the celestial blue turquoises. He would stare at the chains and rings, shimmering with gold on the artistically-wrinkled, black velvet, which finely carpeted the broad reach of the window. And this vagrant attraction, wakened in him by the jewels, seemed to cause a kind of presentiment. All the time, his immature mind would be thinking:

"Alicia would be happy if she should pa.s.s along, now, and see me here."

During those first days of separation, the memory of the beloved one rooted itself into the student's memory under the strange sensation of violet perfume. He either did not remember, or he pretended not to remember, the big, green eyes of the girl, her cruel and epigrammatic little mouth, her firm, white body. But all the more did that violet perfume possess him. He seemed to find his clothes, his hands, his text-books, his poor little bed all odorous of violets. Still, even this sweet illusion began to fade. Time began to blur it out, as it had blurred his recollections of the girl. Darles wept a great deal. And one night he wrote her a desperate, somewhat enigmatic note:

"I'm going to see you, to-morrow. If you won't let me in, I shall die.

Be merciful! My little room no longer smells of violets."

Alicia felt annoyed by the student's note. What was the idea of these ostentatious hyperboles of pa.s.sion? Could Darles have got it into his head that what had happened--one of many adventures in her path--had been anything but perfectly worthless and common? Alicia felt so sure of this that her emotion was one of astonishment, more than of disgust.

Yet, in the beginning, her surprise caused her a certain pleasure.

"It really would be interesting," thought she, "if this boy should fall in love with me like the hero of a play."

But the pleasure of such a curiosity hardly lasted a minute. Soon the girl's cold, selfish spirit, that always traveled in straight lines toward its own ends--the spirit and the will that never let themselves be interfered with--reacted against this romantic possibility. Alicia neither wanted to love nor be loved. For through the experiences of her girl friends she had learned that love, with all its jealousies and pains, is harshly cruel to lover and beloved, alike.

She attached no importance whatever to the caprice that had momentarily thrown her into the student's arms. The evening before their first and only night together, Darles had just happened to find her in one of those fits of the blues, of eclectic relaxation, in which the volatile feminine sense of ethics swings equidistant from good and evil. Her virtues and her vices, alike, were arbitrary and without any exact motive. If the student had perhaps had finer eyes, she would have yielded to him, just the same; then too, perhaps if the emerald necklace that, just a few minutes before, she and Don Manuel had been quarreling about had been less desirable, she would have refused him.

The only certain thing about it all was this, that she had accepted the student's comradeship because in a kind of good-natured way she had reckoned the conversation of even a poor man more entertaining than the remembrance of a necklace. And next morning when she had got back home, she had found herself a little surprised at her own conduct. She felt that she had shown a generosity, a fanciful whim such as perhaps might have driven a critic like Sarcey, after forty years of the real theater, to some miserable little puppet-show. At all events the thing should never happen again. It was absurd!

Next day, Teodora had informed her that Darles had come to see her while she had been out. Day after day, the same thing had occurred. The girl had ended up by feeling very much annoyed at the young fellow's sad obstinacy. A veritable beggar for love, he had come to trouble the easy currents of her idleness. Every time Teodora had told her the student had been back again, Alicia had grown angry.

"What the devil does he want, anyhow?" she would exclaim. "Blest if _I_ know!"

In this she was really sincere. She did not know. The selfish frivolity of her disposition could not understand how any man, after having received the supreme gift from a woman, could do other than get tired of her. Darles' note, complaining of her desertion of him, increased her annoyance. Once for all she felt she must cut this entanglement. What better way could there be than to receive the importunate young fellow and talk to him in a perfectly impersonal way, as if no secret existed between them?

When Darles arrived, next day, at the usual time, Teodora led him into the dining-room.

"I'll tell mistress you're here," said she.

Darles remained standing there, reflective, one elbow leaning against the window-jamb. Once, when he had been nothing but "Don Manuel's friend," Alicia had used to receive him informally. n.o.body had announced him, then. Now he felt himself isolated, stifled by that kind of friendly hostility used on boresome callers. The maid came back and said:

"Mistress will see you. Come this way."

Darles found the girl in her little boudoir, together with a tall, dark-haired girl, dressed in gray. This girl wore English-looking, mannish clothes, well set off by her red tie and by the whiteness of her starched collar and cuffs. When Alicia saw the student, she neither moved nor stretched out her hand to him. All she said was:

"h.e.l.lo, there! Is that you?"

Something in the rather scornful familiarity of her greeting infinitely humbled him. He grew pale. All the blood in his body seemed flooding his heart, turning to ice there. Still discourteous, Alicia introduced him to the other girl:

"Senor Darles--my friend, Candelas."

Candelas fixed her keen, vivid eyes on the new-comer. Then she peered at Alicia, as if asking whether this visit might not perhaps veil some amorous secret. The girl understood, and gave her friend's sophisticated question a vertical answer:

"No, you're wrong. Enrique comes here only because he's Don Manuel's friend."

The student nodded a.s.sent to this, and Candelas smiled coldly. Then the two girls once more took up the thread of the conversation broken by the arrival of Darles. The poor fellow sensed that he was isolated and dismissed. Five, ten, fifteen minutes pa.s.sed, with no break in that animated chatter. Men's names came into it; and Candelas laughed heartily as she reviewed the details of a recent supper she had had.

Alicia laughed, too. Quite possibly she did this to hurt the student's feelings and to persuade herself Enrique really was nothing more to her than just Don Manuel's friend.

A visitor dropped in; an old woman who dealt in clothes and trinkets.

She had a heavy bundle with her, and this she put down on the floor.

Alicia asked her:

"Well, Clotilde, what's new?"

Clotilde fairly oozed enjoyment, in her thick cloak, as she answered:

"I've got the finest petticoats and stockings in the world."

"High-priced?"

"Dirt cheap! I don't know why, but I've got it into my head you want to spend a little money, to-day."

Then the furnishings of the little boudoir vanished under a many-colored flood of showy silks--green, brown, blue--which, as they were spread out, diffused a most delightful perfume of cleanness. As if under some magic spell, Alicia and Candelas fell a prey to the intense, acquisitive pa.s.sion that tortures women in front of shop-windows. The two girls vied in asking the price of every treasure.

"This petticoat here, how much?"

"Seeing it's you, a hundred pesetas."

"And that heliotrope one?"

"Seventy-five. Just take a good look at it. Wonderful!"

With amazement, Enrique studied this profusion of elegance and luxury.

He had never even dreamed civilization wove so many refinements about the art of love. And as his frank eyes observed these petticoats that gently rustled, or took in the lace of these night-dresses--majestically full as senatorial togas--he sadly recalled the poor little white chemises and coa.r.s.e underwear lacking in all adornment, that the women of his home-town hung out to dry on their clothes-lines.

Now a new detail came to increase his misery. The peddler and Alicia were arguing excitedly over the price of the heliotrope petticoat.

Clotilde wanted seventy-five pesetas, and the young woman vowed she couldn't go over fifty. The peddler insisted:

"You'd better make up your mind to take it, because you won't get such a bargain anywhere else. I'm only selling it at this price just to please you, but I'm not making a penny on the deal."

Then she turned to Enrique, and added:

"Come now, this gentleman will buy it for you!"

Darles blushed, and found nothing to say. Men without money are contemptible; and as Alicia did not even deign to look at him, the student knew he had lost her. Dear Lord, if there had only been some devil's bank where lovers might barter off the years of their life, for money, gladly would he have sold his whole existence for those cursed seventy-five pesetas!

Tired of arguing, the peddler gathered up her things and packed them into her valise. The conversation drifted off to other things. The women began talking about jewels. Candelas showed a brooch that had been given her. Clotilde offered the girls a necklace.

"If you'd like to see it, I'll bring it," said she. "I've got it at home."

Alicia sighed deeply; and that long sigh, broken like a child's, expressed enormous grief. She said: