“I’ve had enough of canaille, of any sort,” she said.
“Oh, I understand, perfectly,” said Owen.
After dinner, she went to her room. And through the night she could not sleep, but lay listening to the noises of Mexico City, then to the silence and the strange, grisly fear that so often creeps out on to the darkness of a Mexican night. Away inside her, she loathed Mexico City. She even feared it. In the daytime it had a certain spell—but at night, the underneath grisliness and evil came forth.
In the morning Owen also announced that he had not slept at all.
“Oh, I never slept so well since I was in Mexico,” said Villiers, with a triumphant look of a bird that has just pecked a good morsel from the garbage-heap.
“Look at the frail aesthetic youth!” said Owen, in a hollow voice.
“His frailty and his aestheticism are both bad signs, to me,” said Kate ominously.
“And the youth. Surely that’s another!” said Owen, with a dead laugh.
But Villiers only gave a little snort of cold, pleased amusement.
Someone was calling Miss Leslie on the telephone, said the Mexican chambermaid. It was the only person Kate knew in the capital—or in the Distrito Federal—a Mrs Norris, widow of an English embassador of thirty years ago. She had a big, ponderous old house out in the village of Tlacolula.