“It’s a lie!...  It’s a lie,” murmured Ferragut spitefully.

“Say what you will, but that was the way of it.  We love according to the place and the moment.  If we had met on some other occasion, we might have seen each other for a few hours, no more, each following his own road without further consideration.  We belong to different worlds....  But we were mobilized in the same country, oppressed by the tedium of waiting, and what had to be ... was.  I am telling you the entire truth:  if you could know what it has cost me to avoid you!...

“In the mornings, on arising in the room in my hotel, my first motion was to look through the curtains in order to convince myself that you were waiting for me in the street.  ’There is my devoted:  there is my sweetheart!’ Perhaps you had slept badly thinking about me, while I was feeling my soul reborn within me, the soul of a girl of twenty, enthusiastic and artless....  My first impulse was to come down and join you, going with you along the gulf shores like two lovers out of a novel.  Then reflection would come to my rescue.  My past would come tumbling into my mind like an old bell fallen from its tower.  I had forgotten that past, and its recurrence deafened me with its overwhelming jangle vibrating with memories.  ’Poor man!...  Into what a world of compromises and entanglements I am going to involve him!...  No!  No!’ And I fled from you with the cunning of a mischievous schoolgirl, coming out from the hotel when you had gone off for a few moments, at other times doubling a corner at the very instant that you turned your eyes away....  I only permitted myself to approach coldly and ironically when it was impossible to avoid meeting you....  And afterwards, in the doctor’s house, I used to talk about you, every instant, laughing with her over these romantic gallantries.”

Ferragut was listening gloomily, but with growing concentration.  He foresaw the explanation of many hitherto incomprehensible acts.  A curtain was going to be withdrawn from the past showing everything behind it in a new light.

“The doctor would laugh, but in spite of my jesting she would assure me just the same:  ’You are in love with this man; this Don Jose interests you.  Be careful, Carmen!’ And the queer thing was that she did not take amiss my infatuation, especially when you consider that she was the enemy of every passion that could not be made directly subservient to our work....  She told the truth; I was in love.  I recognized it the morning the overwhelming desire to go to the Aquarium took possession of me.  I had passed many days without seeing you:  I was living outside of the hotel in the doctor’s house in order not to encounter my inamorato.  And that morning I got up very sad, with one fixed thought:  ‘Poor captain!...  Let us give him a little happiness.’  I was sick that day....  Sick because of you!  Now I understood it all.  We saw each other in the Aquarium and it was I who kissed you at the same time that I was longing for the extermination of all men....  Of all men except you!”