I looked at her angrily.

“To the whole . . .  You see I got up rather out of sorts this morning.  Unrefreshed, you know.  As if tired of life.”

The liquid blue in her eyes remained directed at me without any expression except that of its usual mysterious immobility, but all her face took on a sad and thoughtful cast.  Then as if she had made up her mind under the pressure of necessity: 

“Listen, amigo,” she said, “I have suffered domination and it didn’t crush me because I have been strong enough to live with it; I have known caprice, you may call it folly if you like, and it left me unharmed because I was great enough not to be captured by anything that wasn’t really worthy of me.  My dear, it went down like a house of cards before my breath.  There is something in me that will not be dazzled by any sort of prestige in this world, worthy or unworthy.  I am telling you this because you are younger than myself.”

“If you want me to say that there is nothing petty or mean about you, Dona Rita, then I do say it.”

She nodded at me with an air of accepting the rendered justice and went on with the utmost simplicity.

“And what is it that is coming to me now with all the airs of virtue?  All the lawful conventions are coming to me, all the glamours of respectability!  And nobody can say that I have made as much as the slightest little sign to them.  Not so much as lifting my little finger.  I suppose you know that?”

“I don’t know.  I do not doubt your sincerity in anything you say.  I am ready to believe.  You are not one of those who have to work.”

“Have to work—­what do you mean?”

“It’s a phrase I have heard.  What I meant was that it isn’t necessary for you to make any signs.”

She seemed to meditate over this for a while.

“Don’t be so sure of that,” she said, with a flash of mischief, which made her voice sound more melancholy than before.  “I am not so sure myself,” she continued with a curious, vanishing, intonation of despair.  “I don’t know the truth about myself because I never had an opportunity to compare myself to anything in the world.  I have been offered mock adulation, treated with mock reserve or with mock devotion, I have been fawned upon with an appalling earnestness of purpose, I can tell you; but these later honours, my dear, came to me in the shape of a very loyal and very scrupulous gentleman.  For he is all that.  And as a matter of fact I was touched.”

“I know.  Even to tears,” I said provokingly.  But she wasn’t provoked, she only shook her head in negation (which was absurd) and pursued the trend of her spoken thoughts.

“That was yesterday,” she said.  “And yesterday he was extremely correct and very full of extreme self-esteem which expressed itself in the exaggerated delicacy with which he talked.  But I know him in all his moods.  I have known him even playful.  I didn’t listen to him.  I was thinking of something else.  Of things that were neither correct nor playful and that had to be looked at steadily with all the best that was in me.  And that was why, in the end—­I cried—­yesterday.”