Now she sat huddled in her chair, her head drooping on her breast. She appeared to have shrunk; and when, raising her eyes, she met Robledo’s stern ones, she dropped hers again to the bottle.
In the silence that followed Robledo was saying to himself—
“And to think that for this wretched rag of a creature men should have killed each other, women wept, and I should have been made to suffer such torments of anxiety!”
As though divining his thoughts, Elena said humbly,
“You don’t know what I’ve been through these last years.... When the war came, they began to persecute me ... wanted to drive me out of Paris. And they suspected me, thought I was a German spy, thought I was this, and that and the other thing. I went to Italy, I went to many other countries, even your country.... Aren’t you Spanish?... Don’t wonder at the question. I don’t remember so many things.... And when I got back to Paris, I couldn’t find a soul here I knew. Everything was different before the war. It was another world. Every single soul I knew had died or disappeared. I felt as though I had dropped onto another planet. How lonely it has been!”
She sat as though overwhelmed by this new world that was beyond her comprehension.
“And the only person I have met since then who could remind me of the past ... is you! Better if we hadn’t met again....”
Then she continued, as though talking to herself,
“And this meeting is going to make me think of things that I thought I had forgotten forever. Why did you came back from so far away? What made you come over to this part of Montmartre where rich foreigners never come, never? Oh, what a cursed chance!”
Suddenly she straightened up, and he noticed a bluish film over her eyes.