"I never loved! I have been in love fifty times. Why the first time I ever met that Asneiros I fell in love with him at once. He was dressed in a gorgeous coat of crimson velvet, and had diamond buckles in his shoes; it was those buckles that captured me, the first glance at them."
Again she laughed, and this time Marcelino laughed with her.
"But I can tell you one thing I should not like," she said, after a pause; "if I were very much in love with anyone I should not like to see him very friendly with some one very much prettier than I am."
"You need never fear that. Most men say that there is no one in Buenos Aires prettier than you are."
"Traitor! Is not the girl you love fairer to you than any one else in the world?"
"Dearer, yes. But beauty is to be admired, not loved. It is not essential to love that the loved one be beautiful."
"Yet the loved one is always fair?"
"Always."
"Even when she turns her back upon you and leaves you and smiles on some one else?"
"Even then."