From that moment Nacha looked upon Monsalvat as a brother. The wave of feeling carrying her towards him reached its height. She warmly took his hand for a moment and asked him to talk to her about Carlos Riga. There was tenderness in her eyes now. The last vestiges of distrust had vanished. She could have told him everything in her life, shown him the very bottom of her soul. He had known Riga! He need offer no other credentials to claim her friendship!
They talked a long time of the poet, whom Monsalvat had met through Edward Iturbide. The two men had never become intimate friends; for Monsalvat did not frequent the literary Bohemia that had known Riga best. Nacha eagerly sang the praises of her dead friend. Never had there lived so fine a soul, so generous a heart, so kind a spirit! Talking of him seemed to intoxicate her. She spoke confusedly, and at times wildly, in a jerky monologue of broken phrases. The moment came when her eyes filled with tears and she shook with emotion.
"And to think that I, who am speaking to you like this, I left him—the best man who ever breathed! All because I was afraid of poverty, afraid of hunger! It's true I've suffered, Monsalvat, in the life I have been leading: no one can know how much. But all I have been through was nothing compared to the despair I felt when I deserted Riga...."
The poor girl began to sob with great gasps that shook her from head to foot. Monsalvat tried to comfort her in words that astonished him, as he uttered them, for their consoling intensity: never had he heard nor spoken such words before. They seemed to well up from the very depths of suffering in which the girl before him was engulfed.
"I remember so well the morning when I left him," Nacha continued, "I shall remember it all the days God lets me live. We had a poor little room, dark, without air, the most miserable hole in a horrible tenement; and we had no furniture—just two wretched cots, old and broken and dirty. I hadn't slept that night, for I was crying all the time, going over my plans, and imagining how he would feel when he found I had gone."
She stopped a moment to check a sob, and then went on:
"At daybreak I dressed and made a little bundle of the few rags I owned, and all quite calmly. I wanted to put off the terrible moment as long as I could. But at last it came. I was going to leave him—and he loved me! It was so hard to do what I had made up my mind I must do. I went to take a last look at him. He was still asleep. I crept up to him on tiptoe, and kissed him, on the forehead. I don't know what happened then: I had to lean against the wall, for it seemed as though the whole world were falling away from me. My heart must have stopped beating. I thought I was dying and stayed there a long time, without moving, just stupified. When I could move I sat down on my cot and cried, then I got up to go. Every step hurt. I went so slowly, it seemed as though years must have passed—and at the door I looked back.—Why was I leaving him? Why? Why?... At last I crept out into the hall, and began to run, to run like mad, down the stairs, and out into the street...."
"You must tell me your whole life, from the time when you left your mother's," said Monsalvat after a pause.
Nacha hesitated, unwilling for a moment to comply. At last she told him her first tragic adventure; her love affair with one of the young men boarding in her mother's house; his brutality towards her when her timidity and shame placed her at his mercy; his attempts to exploit her, and the illness that followed. She recounted her attempts to support herself, afterwards, by honest work, the usual story of poverty, temptation and despair.