"She had not understood a single word that I had said, or written—and by the time I discovered it, she was another's! He holds her still—you hear him now."
The "interpreter" was speaking again: "Señorita Naranjo desires me to translate——"
[XI]
THE GIRL WHO WAS TIRED OF LOVE
At the Opéra Ball, a boy had danced half the night with a partner whose youthful tones were so delicious, whose tenderness was so attractive, that he implored her a hundred times to unmask. "If I do, you'll get up and go away," she gasped at last, fondling his hand. He vowed that it was her temperament that fascinated him, and she took the mask off—and he saw the sunken face of an old, old woman.
Horrified, he left her.
In the same season, another man supplicated to a girl for her love—a girl with a face so beautiful that it made him forget the strangeness of her voice, which was flat and feeble. And the girl, who looked no more than nineteen, replied with exhaustion: "I outlived such emotions long ago. To tell you the truth, the subject sounds to me ridiculous. All I want to-day is peace and quiet."
Wearily she left him.
These two incidents, peculiar as they are, were the outcome of an occurrence queerer still—an occurrence at the tragic epoch of a woman's life when her glass says: "Stop fooling yourself. You've crumpled to that!"