“I’d kill Juan de Dios,” murmured the girl resolutely.
“If she wished it, I would, too,” replied Quentin, and he stepped into the street.
He walked along in a daze; he repeated Rafaela’s words to himself, and discovered better arguments that he might have put forward in the interview, but which did not occur to him at the moment. Sometimes he thought, more rationally: “At least I came out of it well;” but this consolation was too metaphysical to satisfy him.
He spent a sleepless night at his window watching the stars and thinking. He analyzed and studied his moral problem, proposing solutions, only to reject them.
At dawn he went to bed. He believed that he had hit upon a definite solution—the norm of his existence. Condensed into a single phrase, it was this:
“I must become a man of action.”
CHAPTER XVI
THE MAN OF ACTION BEGINS TO MAKE HIMSELF KNOWN
QUENTIN got up late, ate his breakfast and wrote several letters to his friends in England. In the evening he looked through the amusement section of the paper and saw that there was to be an entertainment in the Café del Recreo.
He asked Palomares where this café was, and was told that it was on the Calle del Arco Real, a street that ran into Las Tendillas.
The constant irritation in Quentin’s mind troubled him so, that he calmly decided to get drunk.