“And the branches of the lime-tree, on which I used to practise my gymnastic exercises, do you remember?”
“Let us not speak of the past,” said Luiza.
“What would you have me speak of, then? The past is my youth, the happiest time of my life!”
“And in Brazil, what did you do?” she asked, smiling.
“What a country!” he exclaimed. “I made love there to a mulatto girl.”
“And why did you not marry her?”
“You are jesting. Marry a mulatto! Besides,” he continued, in an accent that was meant to disclose the presence in his soul of painful memories, “since I did not marry when I ought to have done so, since I lost the best opportunity I shall ever have, I shall always remain a bachelor.”
“And what other present have you brought me besides the rosary?” said Luiza, after a silence during which her cheeks had become suffused with crimson.
“Ah, Suède gloves for the summer,” he replied, “with eight buttons. Here they wear short gloves of two buttons, leaving the wrist exposed, which is horrible! From what I see, the women of Lisbon are the worst-dressed women in the world. It is something atrocious! Of course I do not include you among them, for you are dressed with simplicity, with chic, like every other woman of taste; but in general it is frightful! What fresh and delightful toilets I saw in Paris this summer! But in Paris everything is better than anywhere else. Since I have been here, I have been able to eat nothing,—absolutely nothing. There is no place like Paris for eating.”
Luiza, meantime, kept turning round and round between her fingers a gold locket attached to her neck by a black velvet ribbon.