And she gave a sharp snap with her pink fingers.

“I am telling you everything, you see,” she continued.  “During your long absence I thought of you often.  Somehow I want you to know me thoroughly, once and for all.  In that way perhaps we can get along together better.  I can understand now why it is a peasant woman will walk miles and miles, under a scorching sun or a pouring rain, to have a priest listen to her confession.  I am in that mood this afternoon.  I feel as though I must tell everything.  Even if I tried not to, I should not succeed.  There’s a little demon inside me here urging me, compelling me, to unveil all my past.”

“Please feel quite free to do so.  To be a confessor even, to deserve your confidence, is some progress for me, at any rate.”

“Progress?  But why should you care to progress ... into my heart!  My heart is only an empty shell!  Do you think you’d be getting much if you got me?  I’m absolutely, absolutely worthless!  Don’t laugh, please!  I mean it!  Absolutely worthless.  Here in this solitude I have been able to study myself at leisure, see myself as I really am.  I recognize it plain as day:  I am nothing, nothing.  Good looking?...  Well, yes; I confess I am not what you’d call ugly.  Even if, with a ridiculous false modesty, I were to say I was, there’s my past history to prove that plenty of men have found me beautiful.  But, alas, Rafaelito!  That’s only the outside, my facade, so to speak.  A few winter rains will wash the paint off and show the mould that’s underneath.  Inside, believe me, Rafael, I am a ruin.  The walls are crumbling, the floors are giving way.  I have burned my life out in gaiety.  I have singed my wings in a headlong rush into the candle-flame of life.  Do you know what I am?  I am one of those old hulks drawn up on the beach.  From a distance their paint seems to have all the color of their first voyages; but when you get closer you see that all they ask for is to be let alone to grow old and crumble away on the sand in peace.  And you, who are setting out on your life voyage, come gaily asking for a berth on a wreck that will go to the bottom as soon as it strikes deep water, and carry you down with it!...  Rafael, my dear boy, don’t be foolish.  I am all right to have as a friend; but it’s too late for me to be anything more ... even if I were to love you.  We are of a different breed.  I have been studying you, and I see that you are a sensible, honest, plodding sort of fellow.  Whereas I—­I belong to the butterflies, to the opposite of all you are.  I am a conscript under the banner of Bohemia, and I cannot desert the colors.  Each of us on his own road then.  You’ll easily find a woman to make you happy....  The sillier she is, the better....  You were born to be a family man.”

It occurred to Rafael that she might be poking fun at him, as she so often did.  But no; there was a ring of sincerity in her voice.  The forced smile had vanished from her face.  She was speaking tenderly, affectionately, as if in motherly counsel to a son in danger of going wrong.