“True enough.—Ah, well!”
He drew himself erect, pulling himself together.
“Do you think, Señora Caterina, you might marry our mutual General?” Ramón had put himself aside again.
“I—I don’t know!” stammered Kate. “I hardly think so.”
“He is not sympathetic to you at all?”
“Yes. He is. He is alive, and there is even a certain fascination about him.—But one shouldn’t try marrying a man of another race, do you think, even if he were more sympathetic?”
“Ah!” sighed Ramón. “It’s no good generalising. It’s no good marrying anybody, unless there will be a real fusion somewhere.”
“And I feel there wouldn’t,” said Kate. “I feel he just wants something of me; and perhaps I just want something of him. But he would never meet me. He would never come forward himself, to meet me. He would come to take something from me and I should have to let him. And I don’t want merely that. I want a man who will come half-way, just half-way, to meet me.”
Don Ramón pondered, and shook his head.
“You are right,” he said. “Yet, in these matters, one never knows what is half-way, nor where it is. A woman who just wants to be taken, and then to cling on, is a parasite. And a man who wants just to take, without giving, is a creature of prey.”