He smiled sadly and then went on after a pause,
“Fortunately all women are not like that. She herself told me that in this age of ours, the woman who thinks at all is unhappy and hates all the rest of creation if she can’t have the pearl necklace that is ‘the modern woman’s uniform’.... I am quoting.... But there is something more terrible still than the woman who is determined to get a pearl necklace for herself, Richard, and that is the woman who having had it once, has lost it, and feels that she must at any cost get it back!”
The memory of Gualicho, the demon who tormented the Indians with his wiles, driving them to the point where they mounted their horses and pursued him with darts and tomahawks, passed through his mind. Elena, in the old world, would have been merely one of many dangerous women; and her powers for evil would have been checked and neutralized by the proximity of others like herself. But here, surrounded by men who admired her, conscious of primitive surroundings among which she stood out like a being of finer clay, she had, without wishing to, exerted an influence as evil as that of the red-skinned demon, in former times the terror of the wandering gauchos of the Pampas.
She herself had been a victim of the loneliness of her surroundings to the extent at least of becoming enamored of Watson. She had believed that she could play with men and despise them. That at least was what she had intimated to Robledo one evening, while she gazed pityingly at her victims. But Richard was youth, and masculine energy incarnate; he was, moreover, the object of a young girl’s first love; and so to this mature coquette, eager to win him away from an inexperienced adolescent, as a proof that her former powers of seduction had not yet waned, he represented an irresistible temptation.... And now her vanity had been cruelly wounded. Not only had the only man she had found interesting in this wild desert repulsed her; she had every reason to believe that he despised her....
Robledo meanwhile went on talking about the marquesa with a somewhat contemptuous pity.
“She really believes that she was born for higher things, and yet fate seems determined to make her roll downhill.... It isn’t surprising that she should appear to be a bad woman, when you consider that she doesn’t know what resignation means.”
But the effect of Elena’s influence on affairs at the dam was sufficiently alarming....
“Our contractor dead ... our chief engineer a fugitive.... How can we carry on the work, Watson? The construction at the dam will be delayed and the spring floods will come before we have braced the walls. What are we going to do? I’ll have to run up to Buenos Aires to get help.”
And he spent most of the night worrying about what was to be done to save three years’ labor from destruction.
The next morning Watson got on his horse; but instead of riding towards the canal works he took the road to the Rojas ranch. There was no use going on with this secondary part of the work until the government sent down a new engineer to take over the completing of the work on the dam.