The smoke of many cigarettes obscured their figures, and clouded the mirrors with which the place was lined from floor to ceiling. Emile sat down alone and ordered an absinthe.
When called upon to join in the play, he refused with a scowl and a rasping oath in his native tongue, and as the evening grew on towards midnight he was left to himself and his meditations.
His thoughts were still with Arithelli, the weird witch-girl, whose eyes were like those of Swinburne's fair woman,
"Coloured like a water-flower,
And deeper than the green sea's glass."
He, who now never opened a book, had once known that most un-English of all poets by heart.
In her many phases Arithelli passed before him, as he stared moodily at the shifting opal-coloured liquid in his glass. He thought of her as he had often seen her, fighting through her work at the Hippodrome, the little weary head always gallantly carried, and then when she had dismounted and was in her dressing-room, the rings round her eyes, her shaking hands and utter weariness. He remembered her consideration for her horses, her loathing of the ill-treatment of all dumb things so common here. Once he had found her in the market-place, remonstrating in her broken Spanish with the country women for the inhuman manner in which they carried away their purchases of live fowl, tied neck to neck, and slung across a mule, to die of slow strangulation under the blazing sun. All the animals at the Hippodrome had been better treated since she had been there. It was characteristic of the man that he laughed at her to her face for her campaign against the national cruelty, and in secret thought of her with admiration.
In many ways sexless, in others purely a woman, to every mood she brought the charm of individuality.
Tiens! He was falling in love, he jeered to himself, cynically. In love with that tall, silent creature, who was never in a hurry and never in a temper, and who walked as if she had been bred in Andalusia.
Absurd! He was only interested. She had brains, and she never bored him.
Besides, she was only twenty-four, and one could hardly allow a girl of that age to be thrown warm and living to the wolves and vampires of Barcelona. Perhaps he had been wrong in letting her do some things—drink absinthe, for example. One lost one's sense of mental and moral perspective in a place like this. At least he had guarded her well. If he had not met her that day at the station, she might have fallen into worse hands than his own. Things could not go on indefinitely as they had been going. What was to be the end of it all?