“Never!” she said. “I’m absolutely sure about myself.”
They had been sitting in the garden of the Villa Aragon, under the poinsettia tree with the huge scarlet petal-leaves, like soft red quill feathers. The morning was becoming hot. The lake had gone still, with the fallen wind. Everything was still. Save the long scarlet of the poinsettia.
Christmas was coming! The poinsettia reminded Kate of it.
Christmas! Holly-berries! England! Presents! Food!—If she hurried, she could be in England for Christmas. It felt so safe, so familiar, so normal, the thought of Christmas at home, in England, with her mother. And all the exciting things she could tell to the people at home! And all the exciting gossip she could hear! In the distance, it looked very attractive.—She still had a qualm as to what the actual return would be like.
“One can have too much of a good thing,” she said to Ramón.
“What good thing in particular?” he asked her.
“Oh—Quetzalcoatl and all that!” she said. “One can have too much of it.”
“It may be,” he said, rising and going quietly away; so quietly, he was gone before she knew. And when she realised he had gone like that, she flushed with anger. But she sat on under the poinsettia tree, in the hot, still November sun, looking with anger at the hedge of jasmine, with its pure white flowers, and its sere, withered flowers, and its pinkish buds among the dark leaves. Where had she heard something about jasmine? “And the jasmine flowers between us!”
Oh! how tired she was of all that!
Teresa came down the garden slope.