Trotaconventos: A word with you, Don Jaime.
Jaime Rodriguez: Anon, anon, good dame. I have pressing business in the town.
Trotaconventos: Your business can wait, but not my words. They touch Sister Pilar. (He starts violently and looks at her expectantly.) You see, you will not to your business till I am done with you ... just one little word to bind you to my will! And in that I ever know the little word that will make men hurrying to church or market stand still as you are doing now, or else if they be standing still to run like zebras: they call me a witch.
Jaime Rodriguez: Yes, yes, but you said you had ... a word ... touching ... for my ear.
Trotaconventos: And so I have, Don Jaime; I am making my soul. A hard job, your eyes say. Well, with my brushes and ointments I can make the complexion of a brown witch as fair as a lily, I can make an old face slough its wrinkles like a snake its skin in spring; and who knows what true penitence will not do to my soul?
Jaime Rodriguez: Good dame, I beseech you, to business!
Trotaconventos: And is not the saving of my soul business, if you please?
Jaime Rodriguez: Yes, your confessor’s ... in truth, dame, I am much pressed for time.
Trotaconventos: And yet, though time, or the lack of him, expresses all the marrow from your bones, because of that little name you cannot move till I have said my say. Is it true that St. Mary Magdalene was once a bawd and a maker of cosmetics?