“Those unforgiven tears!  Oh, you simple soul!  Don’t you know that people never cry for anybody but themselves? . . .  Amigo George, tell me—­what are we doing in this world?”

“Do you mean all the people, everybody?”

“No, only people like you and me.  Simple people, in this world which is eaten up with charlatanism of all sorts so that even we, the simple, don’t know any longer how to trust each other.”

“Don’t we?  Then why don’t you trust him?  You are dying to do so, don’t you know?”

She dropped her chin on her breast and from under her straight eyebrows the deep blue eyes remained fixed on me, impersonally, as if without thought.

“What have you been doing since you left me yesterday?” she asked.

“The first thing I remember I abused your sister horribly this morning.”

“And how did she take it?”

“Like a warm shower in spring.  She drank it all in and unfolded her petals.”

“What poetical expressions he uses!  That girl is more perverted than one would think possible, considering what she is and whence she came.  It’s true that I, too, come from the same spot.”

“She is slightly crazy.  I am a great favourite with her.  I don’t say this to boast.”

“It must be very comforting.”

“Yes, it has cheered me immensely.  Then after a morning of delightful musings on one thing and another I went to lunch with a charming lady and spent most of the afternoon talking with her.”

Dona Rita raised her head.

“A lady!  Women seem such mysterious creatures to me.  I don’t know them.  Did you abuse her?  Did she—­how did you say that?—­unfold her petals, too?  Was she really and truly . . .?”

“She is simply perfection in her way and the conversation was by no means banal.  I fancy that if your late parrot had heard it, he would have fallen off his perch.  For after all, in that Allegre Pavilion, my dear Rita, you were but a crowd of glorified bourgeois.”

She was beautifully animated now.  In her motionless blue eyes like melted sapphires, around those red lips that almost without moving could breathe enchanting sounds into the world, there was a play of light, that mysterious ripple of gaiety that seemed always to run and faintly quiver under her skin even in her gravest moods; just as in her rare moments of gaiety its warmth and radiance seemed to come to one through infinite sadness, like the sunlight of our life hiding the invincible darkness in which the universe must work out its impenetrable destiny.

“Now I think of it! . . .  Perhaps that’s the reason I never could feel perfectly serious while they were demolishing the world about my ears.  I fancy now that I could tell beforehand what each of them was going to say.  They were repeating the same words over and over again, those great clever men, very much like parrots who also seem to know what they say.  That doesn’t apply to the master of the house, who never talked much.  He sat there mostly silent and looming up three sizes bigger than any of them.”