La Chica crouched on her knees. The lights on the floor burned before her empty stare, and with her bare shoulders the tone of old ivory emerging from the white linen, with wisps of raven hair hanging down her cheeks, the abandonment of her whole person embodied every outward mark and line of desolation.
“What do you fear from him?” I asked.
She looked up; moved nearer to me on her knees. “I have a lover outside.”
She seized her hair wildly, drew it across her face, tried to stuff handfuls of it into her mouth, as if to stop herself from shrieking.
“He shook his finger at me,” she moaned.
Her terror, as incomprehensible as the emotion of an animal, was gaining upon me. I said sternly:
“What can he do, then?”
“I don’t know.”
She did not know. She was like me. She feared for her love. Like myself! Was there anything in the way of our undoing which it was not in his power to achieve?
“Try to be faithful to your mistress,” I said, “and all may be well yet.”