"Honest and true?"
"Fact! Why? Maybe I look older?"
"No, you don't. Younger, I think. I'm not quite nineteen, but I do look older."
Don Manuel had opened a newspaper, and was reading the latest market quotations. Alicia felt a desire to know the boy's name. She asked him what it was.
"Enrique?" she repeated. "That's a pretty name. Very!"
Then she grew silent a while, remembering all the Enriques she had ever known—and there had been plenty of them. She recalled they'd all been nice. Thus, reviewing her life-history, she reached her childish years; quiet years of peace, lived in the Virgilian simplicity of the country. And she seemed to see in this boy, innocent, healthy and sun-browned, something of what she herself had been.
Quite beside himself with new emotions, ecstatic and open-mouthed, the student looked at her, too, like a man studying some unusually beautiful work of art.
Now many footfalls echoed in the corridors again and bells began to ring. A flood of spectators began to fill up the seats. The third act was going to begin. Alicia and Don Manuel got up.
"Going to stay?" the deputy asked Darlés.
"No, thanks."