When Pascual Cañamares left his classroom, he asked Darlés to go and dine with him. Enrique accepted. It was just noon. Cañamares usually ate at a little tavern in the Plaza de Anton Martín. This was a gay little establishment, with high wooden counters, painted red. The two students sat down before a table, on which the hostess had spread a little tablecloth.
"Well, what do you want?" asked Cañamares.
"Oh, I don't care. Anything you do."
"Soup and stew?"
"All right."
Cañamares ordered, in a free and easy way:
"Landlady! Bring us a stew!"
He was a big, young fellow, twenty, plump and full-blooded, vivacious with that healthy, turbulent kind of joviality which seems to diffuse vital energies all about it. He was very talkative; and in his picturesque and frivolous chatter lay a contagious good-humor. Darlés answered him only with distrait monosyllables. His whole attention was fixed on a few coachmen at the next table. They were talking about a certain crime that had been committed that morning. Two men, in love with the same woman, had fought for her with knives, and one had killed the other. The murderer had been captured. It was a vulgar but intense crime of passion; it seemed to have a certain barbarous charm which, in its own way, was chivalric, since there had been no foul play in the crime. The fight had been fair and open. And the student admired, he even envied those two brave men who, for the sake of love, had not shrunk before the solemnity of a moment in which the death-dealing wound coincides with the knife-thrust which carries a man off to the penitentiary.
As they left the tavern, Pascual took unceremonious leave of his companion.
"I'm going to leave you," said he, "because no one can have any fun with you. Hanged if I know what's the matter with you, to-day! Why, you won't even listen to a fellow!"