Leocadia entered the back shop. Ramon was there, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, exposing his brawny arms, shaking a saucepan gently to cool the egg-paste which it contained; then he proceeded to cut the paste with a hot knife, the sugar fizzing and sending forth a pleasant odor as it came in contact with the hot metal. The confectioner passed the back of his hand across his perspiring brow.
What did Leocadia want? Brizar anisette, eh? Well, it was all sold. "You, Rosa, isn't it true that the anisette is all sold?"
The confectioner's wife was seated in a corner of the kitchen, feeding a sickly-looking infant. She fixed her gloomy, morbidly jealous gaze on the schoolmistress and cried in a harsh voice:
"If you come for more anisette, remember the three bottles that are still unpaid for."
"I will pay them now," answered the schoolmistress, taking a handful of dollars from her pocket.
"Never mind that now, there is no hurry," stammered the confectioner, ashamed of his wife's rudeness.
"Take it, Ramon. Why, it was to give it to you that I came."
"If you insist; but the deuce a hurry I was in."
Leocadia hastened away. Not to have remembered the confectioner's wife! Who would ask anything from Ramon before that jealous tigress, who, small as she was, and sickly as she looked, ruled her burly husband with a rod of iron. Perhaps Cansin——
The clothier was displaying his goods to a group of countrywomen, one of whom persisted in declaring the bunting she was looking at to be cotton, rubbing it between her fingers to prove herself in the right. Cansin, on his side, was rubbing the cloth with exactly opposite views.