“I had excellent teachers,” said Leonora, in speaking of that period of her youth.  “They were good souls at bottom, but they had very little still to learn about life.  I don’t remember just when I began to see through them.  I don’t believe I was ever what they call an ‘innocent’ child.”

Some evenings the Doctor would take her to his group in the cafe, or to some second balcony seat under the roof of La Scala, if a couple of complimentary tickets happened to come his way.  Thus she was introduced to her father’s friends, bohemians with whom music went hand in hand with the ideas and the ideals of revolution, curious mixtures of artist and conspirator; aged, bald-headed, near-sighted “professors,” their backs bent by a lifetime spent leaning over music stands; and swarthy youths with fiery eyes, stiff, long hair and red neckties, always talking about overthrowing the social order because their operas had not been accepted at La Scala or because no maestro could be found to take their musical dramas seriously.  One of them attracted Leonora.  Leaning back on a side-seat in the cafe, she would sit and watch him for hours and hours.  He was a fair-haired, extremely delicate boy.  His tapering goatee and his fine, silky hair, covered by a sweeping, soft felt hat, made her think of Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I of England that she had seen in print somewhere.  They called him “the poet” at the cafe, and gossip had it that an old woman, a retired “star,” was paying for his keep—­and his amusements—­until his verses should bring him fame.  “Well,” said Leonora, simply, with a smile, “he was my first love—­a calf-and-puppy love, a schoolgirl’s infatuation which nobody ever knew about”; for though the Doctor’s daughter spent hours with her green golden eyes fixed upon the poet, the latter never suspected his good fortune; doubtless because the beauty of his patroness, the superannuated diva, had so obsessed him that the attractions of other women left him quite unmoved.  How vividly Leonora remembered those days of poverty and dreams!...  Little by little the modest capital the Doctor owned in Alcira vanished, what with living expenses and music lessons.  Dona Pepa, at her brother’s instance, sold one piece of land after another; but even such remittances were often long delayed; and then, instead of eating in the trattoria, near la Scala, with dancing students and the more successful of the young singers, they would stay at home; and Leonora would lay aside her scores and take a turn at cooking, learning mysterious recipes from the old danseuse.  For weeks at a time they would live on nothing but macaroni and rice served al burro, a diet that her father abhorred, the Doctor, meanwhile, pretending illness to justify his absence from the cafe.  But these periods of want and poverty were endured by father and daughter in silence.  Before their friends, they still maintained the pose of well-to-do people with plenty of income from property in Spain.