Mrs. Howell, née Dolores Maria Cortez, was that pathetic thing, a woman who had once been very beautiful. It was not hard to trace that beauty now, in the high, clean-cut nose, the great languid eyes, the tiny, full, red mouth. But her beauty was clouded with flesh, and her face a mask of powder. She sat on the verandah drinking "pina fria," with her tiny, arched feet on a footstool, and murmured polite accented thanks for the care we had taken of her dear child. I glanced at Bill, over a tray of cakes, but he was looking at Mercedes. So I turned, with a quickened heartbeat, to Mr. Howell. I found him charming, a tall, silent man, brown from the sun, and very lined. He listened eagerly, I fancied, to my chatter of home and snow and the quiet ebb and flow of life in a New England village. But Cuba had marked him for her own. One saw that. And one saw, too, his restless eyes moving from wife to daughter, questioning and troubled.
Mrs. Howell, before she left, asked us to some day attend the races with her. I told her I was not well, not yet up to the excitement of crowds.... But Bill, looking up quickly from his low-voiced conversation with Mercedes, said,
"Perhaps I can persuade Mrs. Denton, dear lady. It is something she surely should not miss."
Our glances met—crossed blades and stayed. Mine was hurt, I know. It was cruel of him, in that insufferably self-assured tone, to brush aside my wishes. When our guests had gone, I told him so.
"But," he said, at the doorway, "what you need more than anything, is contact with people, and to be taken out of yourself. You have never seen anything of the sort before, and you will not have the opportunity again. And the Howells are very good people to tie up to. They have lived here many years and have not wholly discarded the picturesque viewpoints and customs of the country, while at the same time, entering into the life of the American set."
"I didn't come here for society," I said, "and I don't want to be bothered ... by anyone. Go alone to the races, if you will, but I shall not."
He shrugged.
"Very well," he said.
Two days later, Bill drove the car into Havana, where he joined the Howells in a luncheon party and went afterwards to the races with them. I wondered if they would not think it very strange ... under the circumstances. And then I reflected that an extra man, married or bachelor, is welcome almost anywhere. And during my brief betrothal Bill had declared himself "quite free."
I didn't care, of course, where he went or with whom. It was none of my business. And it was the loneliness and the longing for things that could never be mine, which oppressed me and made me spend my sleepless afternoon siesta on a tear-damp pillow.