"Señora ..." he whispered.
The woman suddenly sobbed aloud.
"Oh, señor, they have told me what a hero you were!"
Then the señora suddenly flickered out again.
CHAPTER XIX
Strawbridge could understand only snatches of Benavente's satire which the señora was reading. When the Spanish girl read, she reverted to the soft Castilian pronunciation of her childhood, and Strawbridge's ear was accustomed to the hard colonial accent of South America.
Benavente has a leaning toward the theme of unfaithful wives, and the comedy which the señora had chosen to read was of this type.
As the reading progressed, the mood of the satire, the quirks and turns of Benavente's wit played over the girl's face as if from some delicate, changing illumination, as indeed it was. Presently, in the sheer pleasure of watching her, the sick man gave up the effort to follow the text. He had never before observed such a radiance about her, such a fine, ardent life in her. The drummer's nationality evoked the thought that some artist ought to paint Dolores sitting thus reading. It was his American instinct to commercialize the moment, not for its monetary value but for its pleasure value. He was under the abiding American delusion that pleasures are somehow bottleable; that a pleasure can be commanded to stand still in the heavens, somewhat after the fashion of Joshua's sun. It is the command of these American Joshuas which has inflicted on the world the phonograph, the kodak, the college annual, place-card collections, and the family album.