The peasant woman, tightening her lips with a grimace of pride and disdain, in order that the distance between them might be well-marked, began to fill a jar which the girl gave her with milk from La Rocha's udders. The latter, however, did not take her eyes from the farmer's wife.
"Pepeta,"—she said, in an indecisive voice, as though she were uncertain if it were really she.
Pepeta raised her head; she fixed her eyes for the first time upon the girl; then she also appeared to be in doubt.
"Rosario,—is it you?"
Yes, it was; with sad nods of the head she confirmed it. Pepeta immediately showed her surprise. She here! A daughter of such honourable parents! God! What shame!
The prostitute, through professional habit, tried to receive those exclamations of the scandalized farmer's wife with a cynical smile and the sceptical expression of one who has been initiated into the secret of life, and who believes in nothing; but Pepeta's clear eyes seemed to shame the girl, and she dropped her head as though she were about to weep.
No: she was not bad. She had worked in the factories, she had been a servant, but finally, her sisters, tired of suffering hunger, had given her the example. So here she was, sometimes receiving caresses, and sometimes receiving blows, and here she would stay till she ceased to live forever. It was natural: any family may end thus where there is no mother nor father left. The cause of it all was the master of the land; he was to blame for everything, that Don Salvador, who assuredly must be burning in hell! Ah, thief! How he had ruined the entire family!
Pepeta forgot her frigid attitude and cold reserve in order to join in the girl's indignation. It was the truth, the whole truth! That avaricious old miser was to blame. The entire huerta knew it! Heaven save us! How easily a family may be ruined! And poor old Barret had been so good! If he could only raise his head and see his daughters!... It was well-known yonder that the poor father had died in Ceuta two years before; and as for the mother, the poor widow had ended her suffering on a hospital-bed.
What changes take place in the world in ten years! Who would have said to her, and her sisters, who were reigning like queens in their homes at the time, that they would come to such an end? Oh Lord! Lord! Deliver us from evil!
Rosario became animated during this conversation; she seemed rejuvenated by this friend of her childhood. Her eyes, previously dead, sparkled as she recalled the past.