'I shall be able to please Doña Lorenza, the canon's niece.' 'How is that?'
'She raves over boots and tight-fitting trousers ... it seems they are the very latest thing in Madrid.'
'But what does it matter to you what the niece of Don Gregorio raves or does not rave over, I want to know?'
'It matters a great deal to me, mother.'
'Why?'
"The schoolboy looked supremely foolish.
'Because I am paying her attentions,' he said."
This dialogue was word for word what had passed between my mother and myself after I returned from Landereau's shop, so I grew hot with anger.
"At the words Because I am paying her attentions," continued the narrator, "Samud's mother was overcome with intense astonishment: her son, whom she still pictured as running about the streets in his long print pinafore, or renewing his baptismal vows taper in hand; her son paying attentions to the beautiful Doña Lorenza!—why, it was one of those absurd things she had never even imagined. And her son, seeing she was unconvinced, drew his hand out of his breast pocket and showed her a bracelet of hair with a mosaic clasp. But he took care to keep it to himself that he had taken this bracelet from Doña Lorenza; she had not given it him, and she was very much distressed at not knowing what had become of it."