"In Paris, when I had come back. Have you read my Sobs After Midnight?"
"No."
"Buy it. It contains perhaps the most poignant poems that I have written—they are moans in metres for my loss of Pilar Naranjo."
"You don't say so?"
"She was the passion of my life." He struck an attitude. "Return to your seat alone, mon ami. For company I shall have my bitter thoughts."
Civility forbade me to let him do all the acting, himself, and I said in solemn tones, "I shall remain by your side."
He brooded heavily, with one eye on the past, and the other on the effect he was making. "In my nature," he informed me, "there is, mysteriously, some Castilian quality—no sooner had I arrived in Spain than I bore myself like a Spaniard. I spent fascinating months there, and when I came home, Paris appeared to me a foreign city. Absently I replied to people in Spanish; my fondest possession was a guitar that I had brought back. Though I could not play it, I derived exquisite pleasure from slinging it over my shoulder when I promenaded in the Garden of the Luxembourg. It may be that instinct warned my compatriots that now they were alien to me, for they seemed to avoid me, and I was alone."
"I can understand it," I said.
"One melancholy evening, as I wandered through the barren streets, pining for the magic of Granada, I noticed the name of 'Pilar Naranjo' on the bills of a minor musique 'all. Though it was a name unknown to me, its nationality was an appeal. I entered the musique 'all. I paid for a fauteuil, and received a pink ticket. What a crisis! Even to-day I cannot behold pink tickets without a shudder."
To the strains of an exiguous orchestra, the provocation of the lady's castanets reached our ears gaily. Her victim writhed.