They walked through the gardens. Alicia stopped suddenly in front of a little piece of cultivated ground, where a few vegetables were beginning to spring from the soil.
"This is where you work? I know you amuse yourself working in your garden, just as other Russian princes do by making shoes."
So she knew this too? Oh, that tattle-tale rogue of a Castro!
In the Greek garden, one of the marble benches supported by four winged Victories attracted her attention, causing her to stop for a moment with a pensive expression on her face.
"Do you remember the old man on the bench near the Trojan wall?" she suddenly said.
Michael did not know how to answer her question; but after a few moments he remembered, as though her fixed stare communicated to him the vision of that night in which he had brutally left her.
"How you laughed at me! What a fool I must have seemed! Yes: I was unbearable. I was Venus; I was the center of the world; everything in existence, people and things, had been created for my special benefit. I felt it was my mission to make the world endure my whims, and that the world ought to thank me on its knees for paying any attention to it. What can you expect! It was youth, and the childish pride of our Springtime, which imagines itself eternal. And afterwards! If I were to tell you all the disillusionments, and all the sorrows that I experienced, even back in the days when I didn't have to worry about money! Winter sweeps away all our fancies of Maytime!"
"But you're not an old woman yet!" Michael exclaimed. "You still inspire romantic love in young men. You're fooling yourself or trying to make fun of me. There are still lots of men who, when they see you, would...."
"Perhaps," she replied, "but you, my dear, are not one of them. Confess it; I've never pleased you."
The Prince decided not to confess anything, and changed the conversation. These allusions to the past annoyed him. Alicia irritated him, every time she attempted to revive her charms as a siren of men.