Now many footfalls echoed in the corridors again and bells began to ring. A flood of spectators began to fill up the seats. The third act was going to begin. Alicia and Don Manuel got up.

"Going to stay?" the deputy asked Darles.

"No, thanks."

"Why not?"

"Because--well, I've got to go to bed early. To-morrow I'm going to get up early."

He felt so sure that Alicia might be able to love him, and so overpowered by the happy embarra.s.sment of this thought, that he wanted to be alone, to enjoy it more fully. Don Manuel added:

"Well, suit yourself. Any time you want to see me, don't go to my house.

I'm never there. Better go to Alicia's. You'll find me there every evening, from six to eight."

They took leave of each other. Enrique turned his head, as he left the box, and his eyes met the girl's. Their look was a meeting of caresses, as if they had given each other a kiss and made a rendezvous. It was one of those terrible looks, capable of changing the whole current of a man's life--a look such as a man will sometimes receive in his youth, only to find it hounding and pursuing him his whole life long.

II

Next day, Alicia spent the evening before her fireplace, with a book.

Don Manuel's visit to her had ended in a quarrel, and he had gone. A great nervousness possessed the girl; she wanted to cry, to yawn, to pull out her hair, to kick the little cabinets from behind whose crystal panes all kinds of little figurines, porcelain dolls and extravagant bibelots peeped out with roguish faces.

No one who has never been really bored can grasp the complete horror, the abysmal blackness, the silence like that of a bottomless pit or an endless tunnel, which lies in absolute boredom. Still, just as death is the beginning of life, so at times tedium can become a spring of vigorous action. Many men have sown wild oats in their youth till they have tired of them, and have in riper years become model husbands, applied themselves to business and died leaving millions. Boredom sometimes turns out works of art. Had not Heine and Byron been monumentally bored, they could never have risen to the heights of song.

Now, though Alicia Pardo was very young, she already suffered from this malady--the malady of quietude which rubs out boundary-lines and extinguishes contrasts. Never yet had she been in love. The selfishness of her lovers had in the end endowed her soul--itself little inclined to tenderness--with all the hardness of a diamond.

"I can't love any one," she often said. "I've made a regular man of myself."

Since the human mind cannot long remain unoccupied by real emotions, she had come to adore luxury. She was neither miserly nor greedy for money; but she did indeed love purple and fine linen, noisy hats and precious stones glimmering with sunlight. Her idea of life was to buy good furnishings, appear in new gowns, show herself off, waste everything without restraint. With her pretty hands, now craving money and now throwing it to the four winds, she made ducks and drakes of men's fortunes. She had many things and wanted more; and as one quickly tires of what one has, her property did not increase.

The young woman was in high dudgeon, that evening. She knew not what to do. Her money was running short, and that morning in a bazaar she had seen all kinds of pretty gewgaws. She had taken up a book to amuse herself, but had not been able to read much. Her irritation would not go away. Why couldn't she be infinitely rich? Already she was beginning to consider this poor life of ours a grotesque affair--this life in which so many men think themselves happy in the possession of the ten-millionth part of what they really want.

It was almost seven o'clock when Enrique Darles arrived. As soon as Alicia saw the student, she heaved a sigh of contentment and threw the book into the fire.

"What are you doing, there?" cried Darles, to whom every book was sacred.

"Nothing," she answered. "It's a stupid novel. We ought to do the same with everything that bores us."

Enrique sat down and asked:

"Don Manuel--?"

"He's been here a while, but he's gone. I mean, I sent him away. I tell you I'm unbearable, to-day. I'd like to fight with everybody. I don't know what I wouldn't give to feel some new sensation--something real and strong. I'm in despair, I tell you! It's these nerves, these cursed nerves, that wake up everything ugly and vulgar in us. To-day is one of the black days when even the good luck of our friends makes us miserable."

She stopped and peered closely at Darles. His close-shaven face, his southern eyes and wavy black hair made him look like some handsome, gentle boy.

"I'm strange," she continued. "I'm a chatter-box, ungrateful and never able to love anything very long. That's why you attracted my attention the first minute. You look like a man of strong pa.s.sions. I like radical characters, good or bad. I like iron wills. Lukewarm temperaments, undecided and ready to fit into any situation, look to me like half-season clothes that are always disagreeable. In summer they're too warm and in winter too cold."

Darles ventured to say with some timidity:

"What's the reason you're put out to-day?"

"I don't know."

"What?"

"It's true. Unless it might be----"

She stopped, inwardly searching her thoughts, then went on:

"It's because you're very young that my words astonish you. Sometime you'll be older, and then you'll understand the world better. You'll know the cause of all these little vexations that embitter life can't be found in concrete facts. We have to recognize such vexations as the total, the corollary of our whole history, of everything we've lived through. For example, we're sad now because we were sad before, or maybe gay. In to-day's tears you'll find the bitter-aloes of the tears of long ago; and there's the weariness of dead laughter there, too. Understand?

Don't wonder, therefore, that you can't comprehend exactly why I'm in such a bad temper, to-day."

She grew quiet, sinking down into a brown study that drew a vertical line upon her pretty brow. Then she asked:

"Do you often go through Calle Mayor?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Do you remember the jeweler's shop on the right, on the even-numbered side, near the Puerta del Sol?"

The student nodded.

"Well, if you like jewels," continued Alicia, "take a look at that emerald necklace in the middle of the window. I just happened to see it, to-day, and it made such an impression on me that I haven't been able to get it out of my mind. It's magnificent, not only in size and in the wonderful l.u.s.ter of the stone, but also on account of its splendid clasp."

"Worth a lot, eh?"

"Fifteen thousand pesetas."

Darles said nothing to this. But his brows lifted with admiration. Such figures filled his provincial simplicity with panic and confusion. By comparison with the miserable shallowness of his purse, they seemed enormous. Little Goldie continued:

"I told Don Manuel about it, but he's a clever fox. He's a sly one!

There's no way in this world to rake _him_ into spending any extra money. That's partly what we've just now been quarreling about. Believe me, it's men's own fault if we aren't more faithful to them."

Ignorant as he was of feminine psychology, Enrique understood that Alicia's black humor was on account of that emerald necklace she so deeply admired and so greatly wanted. Unsatisfied desires are like undigested foods. At first they cause us a vague ill-ease, which soon increases until indigestion sets in. Following this same line of thought, is not disappointment or grief, in a way, the indigestion of a caprice? Ingenuously, without realizing the indiscretion of promising anything to women or children, Enrique exclaimed:

"If I were only rich--!"

The pause that followed was like that in a romance; one of those silences during which women decide to do any and everything. Then all at once, with the same bored gesture she had used when she had tossed the book into the fire, Alicia put one of her little hands into the bony, trembling hands of the student.

"Do you like my hands?" she queried.

"Enormously!"

"People say they're very big."