Still trying to be useful, Elena took off her gloves in order to wash the dishes, but she at once put them on again, fearful that the very hot water might injure her delicate skin, and destroy the polish of her nails—and she remembered that in her moments of despair, she had felt a certain relief in contemplating her hands.
Torre Bianca, dressed in a tweed riding suit, accompanied Watson and Robledo to the canals. He watched the pile drivers at work, saw what was being done, and talked with the peons. It wasn’t long before he was covered with dust from head to foot; his sunburned hands itched painfully; and yet he already felt the happy tranquillity of the man who knows that he can earn his daily bread.
At nightfall the three engineers returned to the house, where they found dinner awaiting them. Elena had been complaining of the rustic simplicity of the table covers and plates. The half-breed, at her instigation, purchased for a modest price, some additional pieces of china which had found their way from Buenos Aires to the “Galician’s Resort.” The next day some flowers, brought in by the two little copper-colored errand girls, appeared on the table, and it became more evident from day to day that there was now a woman accustomed to the refinements of life in the engineers’ house.
One evening, while the half-breed was serving the first course, Elena threw off from about her shoulders an old evening wrap which, as it was somewhat the worse for its previous services, she now used as a dressing gown. As she emerged from this covering it was revealed that she was in evening dress. Her gown was a little worn, but it was still a brilliant relic of happier days.
Watson looked at her with astonishment, Robledo made a gesture which indicated that he thought she had gone crazy, but the Marquis remained impassive, as though nothing that Elena did could cause him any surprise.
“I’ve always dressed for dinner,” observed Elena, “and I don’t see any reason for changing my habits here. It would make me so uncomfortable!”
The hours after the evening meal were usually spent in long conversations. Robledo did most of the talking. He liked to tell the stories of the various interesting characters he had seen pass through “the land of all the world.” Many of them had already wandered over a great part of the planet before they landed in the port of Buenos Aires. Others eager for adventure had fled to the new continent in order to begin a new life there.
In the capital they had encountered the same obstacles as those they had run away from in Europe. The big city was already old. Tenements and slums had grown up there too, and it was as hard to make a living as ever it was in Europe. Sometimes it was even harder, so great was the competition between all professions in the crowd thronging into Buenos Aires from every quarter of the globe.
So they sought the waste places of the republic, the territories that were still arid plains, and began transforming them for the future generations of immigrants.
“What a lot of strange characters I have seen pass through here!” Robledo would begin. “I remember one fellow, a peon, who, in spite of his angry-looking, bulbous nose, inflamed by long years of drinking, still had something about him that suggested an interesting history. When he came straggling through here he was nothing but a wreck; but he was like those ruined palaces, the smallest fragment of which, a piece of broken pillar, or a bit of pediment, picked up from among the crumbled walls, evokes the splendors of the past. Yet this fellow would stop at nothing, not even theft, when he craved drink, and would lie for days on the ground dead drunk. But a gesture, a chance word would make us suspect that he had not always been a dirty, drink-sodden vagabond.