"Will you let me die?"
"Yes."
"Thank you. Let me kiss your hair, then."
"No."
"Your hands."
"No."
"Let me kiss something of yours. See, you are doing me a lot of harm."
"Kiss this glove," said the girl, laughing, and taking one from the toilet table. Gonzalo seized it, and kissed it passionately several times.
The reader, who may have denounced Gonzalo in his heart as a disloyal, perfidious fellow, or at least weak, and maybe deserving the appellation of "a disagreeable character," as the critics say when the people in novels are not all as heroic and as clever as might be wished, must imagine himself in that little nest, as full of perfume as the chalice of a magnolia, with the youngest daughter of the Belinchons, dressed in a blue-ribboned peignoir, revealing a good part of her neck, like roses and milk, with her shining blue eyes on him, and a soft, melodious voice that moved his very soul, and if the girl gave him a glove, saying "kiss it," he must think whether he could refrain from doing so.
"You must calm yourself, Gonzalo," she said, with a smile that would have bewitched St. Anthony.