“Let us sit down,” said Ramón, still in Spanish. He and she sat in the cane rocking-chairs: Cipriano stood by the wall of the terrace.
She had come to make a sort of submission: to say she didn’t want to go away. But finding them both in the thick of their Quetzalcoatl mood, with their manly breasts uncovered, she was not very eager to begin. They made her feel like an intruder. She did not pause to realise that she was one.
“We don’t meet in your Morning Star, apparently, do we!” she said, mocking, but with a slight quaver.
A deeper silence seemed suddenly to hold the two men.
“And I suppose a woman is really de trop, even there, when two men are together.”
But she faltered a bit in the saying. Cipriano, she knew, was baffled and stung when she taunted him.
Ramón answered her, with the gentleness that could come straight out of his heart: but still in Spanish:
“Why, Cousin, what is it?”
Her lip quivered, as she suddenly said:
“I don’t really want to go away from you.”