“Hold your head up a little—take care, now—there, that will do.”{147}
“Hurrah! Victory! Now button it for me.”
The slender fingers, marked with the pricking of the needle, passed over the throat of the student, who broke into fresh cries:
“Oh! Oh! Oh! she is p-i-i-i-nching me.”
As soon as the collar was buttoned, however, he said softly, as if he were begging her to render him some important and difficult service:
“Esclavita, deign to encircle my neck with this halter.”
Esclavita took the silk necktie, and as she put it around the young man’s neck their glances met. During the previous operations this had not happened, for Rogelio’s head had been turned aside, as far as his fits of laughing would permit; but now it could not be avoided, for Esclavita’s face was raised, and Rogelio, taller than she, looked, of necessity, into her eyes, green, shot with golden lights; and the parting of the hair, straight and even, like a furrow cut through a field of ripe grain; and her rounded forehead, smooth and fine, and the little blue veins in her temples and eyelids. He inhaled her sweet breath, that intoxicated him for a moment, as if he had opened a jar of oxygen.
It was but for a moment, but it was a moment which seemed to Rogelio a year. Childhood, with its butterfly lightness, its blue and silvery skies, was left behind forever. Esclavita, having finished tying the cravat, drew back to a little distance, the better to observe the effect of the bow.
It was as if the communication between the wire and the battery had been interrupted. Rogelio came to his senses. “How disgraceful!” he thought. “What a vexation for my mother!”