"I believe you have not as yet had the pleasure of meeting Señorita Rosamel." Here he led Strawbridge nearer Madruja. "Señorita, may I present my dear friend Señor Tomas Strawbridge of Nueva York?"
The girl remained seated and simply extended a hand. Whether she did this out of timidity, or out of pride in her new silks and jewels, the drummer could not guess. The hand she placed in his was small and not badly shaped, but hard and rough from the work of a peon woman. She said nothing at all, but sat looking at Strawbridge out of black eyes which could endure the fire of a ruby. They were the shining, surfacy eyes one sees in wild animals and in entirely illiterate persons. Of what thoughts, if any, lay behind those surfaces, the drummer could not get the slightest inkling.
However, she seemed tractable enough. With a little sinuous movement she made room on the couch for the general. With perfect inertness she allowed him to possess her hand. He picked it up, spread it in his palm, and began patting and stroking it while his conversation returned to Strawbridge.
"You may light a cigar in here and be comfortable," he invited. "Madruja is no obstacle to relaxation; rather, an assistance. Have you never observed that your thoughts flow more smoothly when your arm is about a pretty woman?"
None of the scene was agreeable to Strawbridge, but this peculiar turn caused him to ejaculate:
"You can think better with your arm around a woman?"
"Seguramente, señor," agreed the dictator. "Have you not observed that some men twiddle a pencil when they think, others smoke, some walk up and down with their hands behind their backs? All of these are mere bachelorish makeshifts. Your true thinker meditates with a woman's head on his shoulder. It is, you might say, señor, the only connection between a woman's head and thought."
As the general's thought had become more involved, he had drawn Madruja to him and now sat caressing her, his fingers playing abstractedly with the ruby and along the faint indentures of her clavicles.
Strawbridge disapproved of this almost beyond patience. He resented this establishment in the west wing of the palace, on account of the señora. It seemed to him that it would have been much more decent and respectful if the dictator had taken away this second ménage, had hidden it out of sight and denied it as Americans do in such cases.