"Smoke?" asked he.
"No, thanks."
"Good boy!" exclaimed the deputy. "You haven't any vices, have you?"
"What?" asked Alicia. "You don't smoke?"
"No, Señorita."
"How funny you are! Well, I do!"
Enrique blushed again, and looked down. He saw quite clearly that this little detail made the beggarliness of his clothes even more noticeable. Women always seem to like a man to smoke. Tobacco is their best perfume. The student felt furious at himself. To regain countenance before this girl he would gladly have consumed all the Egyptian or Turkish cigarettes in Don Manuel's case. But it was too late, now. Opportunity was gone; opportunity, that master-magic which endues everything with grace and worth.
The young woman's self-possession was quite English in its cool perfection as she lighted up and fell to smoking, with one leg crossed over the other. She leaned her shoulders against the dun-hued back of the divan. And now, all about her diabolical, reddish-gold hair, the cigarette-smoke mounted thinly on the quiet air, and wove blue veils. Darlés observed her, from the corner of his eye. Her face was aquiline, with wide nostrils, with a little blood-red, cruel mouth and a low forehead that gave the impression of hard, instinctive selfishness. Her big, greenish eyes peered out with boredom and command. Her whole expression was cold, keen, probing, pitiless.
A string of seed-pearls girdled her soft, rosy throat. Her fingers blazed with the fire of her rings. Her nails were sharp as claws. In the well-harmonized rhythms of her every attitude, in all her perfect modelings, in every nuance and detail of her—wonderful plaything for men's dalliance—Enrique, untutored country boy though he was, discerned a supremely selfish ego. He realized this woman was one of those emotionless creatures of willfulness, wholly self-centered, who are incapable of sorrow.
Don Manuel's mood was brusque, with that brusquerie of a rich, healthy man who has a pretty woman in tow, as he exclaimed: