She paused a moment, then added gravely, looking at Robledo,
“You, for instance, don’t care so much for money. What you want is adventure, life, activity. You like to use your strength. You don’t really know what money means. Men like you don’t need much for themselves. Only a woman can teach men what money is worth in this world!”
She turned to look at Torre Bianca, adding,
“And yet the men who have a woman to take care of never have the forcefulness, somehow, to accomplish things the way men do when they are alone in the world....”
Robledo, after this first luncheon at his friend’s house, became a frequent visitor at the Torre Biancas, dropping in as informally as though he really were a member of his host’s family.
“Elena likes you very much, really likes you, my dear fellow,” Torre assured him; and he looked immensely relieved. It would have been so difficult if he had had to choose between his wife and his friend, as he would have had to do in case they hadn’t hit it off!
Robledo, for his part, was somewhat disconcerted by Elena. When she was present he yielded to the charm of her person, to the peculiar seductive quality that enhanced her beauty. She always treated him with a gracious familiarity, quite as though he really were her husband’s brother, and took charge of initiating him in Paris society, giving him plenty of advice and information so as to prevent his being taken in by those disposed to see an advantage for themselves in his being a foreigner, and accompanying him to the fashionable resorts of the city, either at teatime or at night, after dinner.
Her mischievous and childlike expression, her imperturbable way of looking at him, the childish lisp with which she pronounced certain words, all had a certain fascination for the engineer.
“She’s a child,” he told himself. “Her husband is right about that. She has all the tricks of the dolls that society turns out—and she must be fearfully expensive! But, underneath all this, there is probably a very simple woman....”
When he was not with her, however, he was less optimistic about his friend’s wife, and smiled somewhat ironically at the latter’s credulity. Who was this woman? Where had Torre met her?