“You are right about the difference in our experiences,” she agreed; “I was dancing for a living at six; at ten I had another accomplishment. I have lived in rooms inlaid with gold, and in cellars with men where murder would have been a gracious virtue. Yes, lime flower, there is little you know that could be any assistance to me. But the other, your purity, your effort of nobility, that I must learn from you.”
He explained his meaning more fully to her, and she listened intently. “You think,” she interrupted, “that a woman must be attached to something real, like your arm or a pot of gold. You know them, and that at your age, at any age, is a marvel enough in itself. The wisest men in Europe have tried to understand the first movement of my dancing—how, in it, a race, the whole history of a nation, is expressed in the stamp of a heel, the turn of a hip. They wonder what, in me, had happened to the maternal instinct, why I chose to reflect life, as though I were a mirror, rather than experience it. And now, it seems, you see everything, all is clear to 100 you. You have put a label, such as are in museums, on women; good!”
She smiled at him, mocking but not unkind.
“However,” he told her crossly, “that is of very little importance. How did we begin? I have forgotten already.”
“In this way,” she said coolly; “I asked if it would be of any interest to—let us say, your friends, to learn that the United States, in spite of the Administration, will not recognize a Republican Cuba. Fish is unchangeably opposed to the insurgents. You may expect no help there.”
“That might be important to the insurgents,” he admitted; “but where are they to be found—in the cabildos of Los Egidos?”
“At least repeat what you have heard to Escobar: is it Andrés or Vincente?”
The name of Andrés’ brother was spoken so unexpectedly, the faintest knowledge of Vincente on the part of the dancer of such grave importance, that Charles Abbott momentarily lost his composure. “Vincente!” he exclaimed awkwardly. “Was that the other brother? But he is dead.”
“Not yet,” she replied. “It is planned for tonight, after dinner, when he is smoking in the little upper salon.”