"Very soon I gathered that she was popular there; but on the stage, to be a foreigner is to be a favourite, and I prepared myself to be disappointed when she appeared. Sapristi! I was spellbound. She danced, that night, the habenera that she is dancing now. Ah, those cajoling arms, so irresistible! How imperial was her form, how Southern were her feet! And her face! the bewildering beauty of her face that haunts me still."
I got up.
"Sit down—I could not endure your looking at her without me!" he gasped. "When her turn finished, I had no thought but her; I was scarcely conscious of the monkeys that came next. In some fifteen minutes a girl had danced herself into my destiny—and I was swept to the stage door, like a leaf, on the gale of my emotions.
"I could see nobody inside, to take a message. Ten minutes—a quarter of an hour passed. I waited in the gloomy little cul-de-sac, dreading, in every second, to hear the approaching footstep of a rival with an appointment. So tremendous was my agitation that Spanish tenses with which I was normally familiar evaded me, and my brain buzzed with the effort to compose a preliminary phrase.
"The door opened. Before her features were visible in the darkness, the majesty of her deportment proclaimed that it was she. I advanced. I bowed, with all my grace.
"'Señorita,' I said, 'I am a poet, and I adore you. Will you honour me by supping with me?'
"It was not the overwhelming eloquence that I should have had in French, but I felt that the fervour of my voice should make amends; and I prayed that she would not be flippant in return. My sentiment demanded sweet, grave, contralto tones; a giggle would have been torture to me. Once more, a crisis—a spiritual crisis, in which my heart ceased to beat. Would she respond gravely, or would she giggle?
"She did neither one nor the other. As if I had not spoken, she went by.
"Comment done? I had referred clearly to supper; I was well-dressed, young, handsome—and a dancer at a fifth-rate musique 'all, which was not precisely a college for decorum, refused to dispense with the ceremony of an introduction!