"If you were only willing," Señor Benjamin often said to Rafaela, "we could come to an understanding. You're all alone. So am I. Well, why not live together?"
She smiled, with that disillusion which comes to a soul that life has bit by bit ravaged of all its dreams.
"You're crazy to talk that way, Benjamin," she would answer.
"Why?"
"Oh, because."
"Come now, explain that! Why am I crazy?"
Rafaela did not want to annoy the man, because she would thus lose a customer, and so she gave him an evasive answer:
"Why, I'm already old."
"Not for me!"
"I'm ugly!"