"I understand, Monsieur. I hope you will not consider me ungrateful, but there is a reason."
"It's a woman?"
Vardri bowed gravely. "Exactly, Monsieur. It's a woman."
"You are risking a great deal for her. Poleski has told me something of your circumstances, and it appears that if you do not get some appointment very soon, you will starve."
Vardri straightened himself, throwing back his head with a characteristic gesture. He looked the older man in the eyes, his own alight and eloquent under finely drawn brows.
"That's as it may be! I'll take my chance of work. In any case I cannot leave Barcelona. Of course, I regret greatly that it is impossible for me to fall in with your arrangements."
Vladimir smiled and shrugged. He knew the type with which he had to deal. Quixotic and generous to the verge of folly, the type that will sacrifice itself without reserve for an illusion, an ideal; the type that filled monasteries, and Siberian prisons, and made a jest for half the world. Such men were valuable to the Cause, because they gave ungrudgingly, and never counted cost. The Russian was a man of affairs, cautious, cynical and given to analysis, and he was also a student of human nature. He was moreover interested in the unknown woman.
If he had been told that she was Arithelli the circus-rider, who had sat silently upon the deck of his yacht dressed in gaudy raiment, and indifferent almost to stupidity, then his smile would have been contemptuous instead of tolerant. He was interested too in the unknown woman's champion. Something in Vardri's attitude of courteous defiance appealed to him by the law that will attract strongly one man's mind to another, diverse in every way. He could see that Vardri was plainly consumptive, and that the disease was in its advanced stages. Even with the aid of good food and an easier life he could not last more than a year or two, so one might as well make things a little more smooth for him during the time.
"I see you have the illusions of youth, my friend," he said carelessly. "I trust they may remain long unbroken. Myself I am sorry to have lived beyond the age when they content one. Sit down and talk to me." He motioned Vardri towards a chair. "Well, since you have refused to entertain my plan, we must think of something else. I'm at present writing a series of articles on 'Militarism in France,' and should like to have them translated for publication in an English journal. You speak the language well, better even than Poleski, for you have a better accent. I have been a good deal in London and I notice the difference. I suppose you also write it easily?"
"Yes, I had an English tutor."