Without words, without gestures, Dona Rita was heard again.  “It may have been as near coming to pass as this.”  She showed me the breadth of her little finger nail.  “Yes, as near as that.  Why?  How?  Just like that, for nothing.  Because it had come up.  Because a wild notion had entered a practical old woman’s head.  Yes.  And the best of it is that I have nothing to complain of.  Had I surrendered I would have been perfectly safe with these two.  It is they or rather he who couldn’t trust me, or rather that something which I express, which I stand for.  Mills would never tell me what it was.  Perhaps he didn’t know exactly himself.  He said it was something like genius.  My genius!  Oh, I am not conscious of it, believe me, I am not conscious of it.  But if I were I wouldn’t pluck it out and cast it away.  I am ashamed of nothing, of nothing!  Don’t be stupid enough to think that I have the slightest regret.  There is no regret.  First of all because I am I—­and then because . . .  My dear, believe me, I have had a horrible time of it myself lately.”

This seemed to be the last word.  Outwardly quiet, all the time, it was only then that she became composed enough to light an enormous cigarette of the same pattern as those made specially for the king--por el Rey!  After a time, tipping the ash into the bowl on her left hand, she asked me in a friendly, almost tender, tone: 

“What are you thinking of, amigo?”

“I was thinking of your immense generosity.  You want to give a crown to one man, a fortune to another.  That is very fine.  But I suppose there is a limit to your generosity somewhere.”

“I don’t see why there should be any limit—­to fine intentions!  Yes, one would like to pay ransom and be done with it all.”

“That’s the feeling of a captive; and yet somehow I can’t think of you as ever having been anybody’s captive.”

“You do display some wonderful insight sometimes.  My dear, I begin to suspect that men are rather conceited about their powers.  They think they dominate us.  Even exceptional men will think that; men too great for mere vanity, men like Henry Allegre for instance, who by his consistent and serene detachment was certainly fit to dominate all sorts of people.  Yet for the most part they can only do it because women choose more or less consciously to let them do so.  Henry Allegre, if any man, might have been certain of his own power; and yet, look:  I was a chit of a girl, I was sitting with a book where I had no business to be, in his own garden, when he suddenly came upon me, an ignorant girl of seventeen, a most uninviting creature with a tousled head, in an old black frock and shabby boots.  I could have run away.  I was perfectly capable of it.  But I stayed looking up at him and—­in the end it was he who went away and it was I who stayed.”

“Consciously?” I murmured.