The cruel mocker!  How she laughed!  How she was avenging herself.  Rafael grew angry at this cutting, ironic resistance.  He began to flame with a more excited passion....  The ravages of time made no difference.  Could not Love work miracles!  He loved her more than he had ever loved her in the olden days.  He felt a mad hunger for her.  Passion would give them back the fires of youth.  Love was like a springtime that brings new sap to branches grown numb in the winter’s cold.  Let her say “Yes,” and on the instant she would behold the miracle, the resurrection of their slumbering past, the awakening of their souls to the future of love!

“And your wife?  And your children?” Leonora asked, brutally, as if she wished to bring him back to realities, with a smarting lash from a whip.

But Rafael was now beside himself, drunk with the nearness of all that beauty, and with the waves of perfume that filled the interior of the carriage.

Wife?  Family?  He would leave everything for her:  family, future, position.  It was she he needed to live and be happy!

“I will go with you; everybody is a stranger to me when I think of you.  You, you alone, are my life, my love!”

“Many thanks,” Leonora answered curtly.  “I could not accept such a sacrifice....  Besides, all that sanctity of the home you were just talking about a few moments ago in the Chamber?  And all that Christian morality, without which civilization would go to the damnation bow wows!  How I laughed when I heard you say that.  How you were stuffing those poor ninkampoops!...”

And again she laughed cruelly, at the contrast between his pious words in Congress and his mad idea of forsaking everything to follow her around the world.  Oh, the hypocrite!  She had felt, as she sat listening to him, that his speech was a pack of lies, a mess of conventional trumpery and platitudes!  The only one there who had spoken with any real sincerity, any real virtue, was that little old man, whom she had listened to with veneration because he had been one of her father’s idols!

Rafael was crushed with bitter shame.  Leonora’s flat refusal, her pitiless mockery of his speech, had brought him to realize the enormity of his baseness.  She was avenging herself by bringing him face to face with the abjectness of his mad, hopeless passion, which made him capable of committing the lowest deeds!

Dusk was gathering.  Leonora ordered the driver to the Plaza de Oriente.  She was stopping in one of the houses near the Opera where many theatrical people lodged.  She was in a hurry!  She had a dinner engagement with that young man from the Embassy, and two musical critics were to be introduced to her.

“And I, Leonora?  Are we not to see each other any longer?”

“As far as my door, if you wish, and then ... till we meet again!”

“Oh, please, Leonora, stay here a few days!  Let me see you!  Let me have the consolation of talking to you, of feeling the bitter pleasure of your ridicule, at least!”