"No, thanks."

"Good boy!" exclaimed the deputy. "You haven't any vices, have you?"

"What?" asked Alicia. "You don't smoke?"

"No, Senorita."

"How funny you are! Well, _I_ do!"

Enrique blushed again, and looked down. He saw quite clearly that this
little detail made the beggarliness of his clothes even more noticeable.
Women always seem to like a man to smoke. Tobacco is their best perfume.
The student felt furious at himself. To regain countenance before this
girl he would gladly have consumed all the Egyptian or Turkish
cigarettes in Don Manuel's case. But it was too late, now. Opportunity
was gone; opportunity, that master-magic which endues everything with
grace and worth.

The young woman's self-possession was quite English in its cool
perfection as she lighted up and fell to smoking, with one leg crossed
over the other. She leaned her shoulders against the dun-hued back of
the divan. And now, all about her diabolical, reddish-gold hair, the
cigarette-smoke mounted thinly on the quiet air, and wove blue veils.
Darles observed her, from the corner of his eye. Her face was aquiline,
with wide nostrils, with a little blood-red, cruel mouth and a low
forehead that gave the impression of hard, instinctive selfishness. Her
big, greenish eyes peered out with boredom and command. Her whole
expression was cold, keen, probing, pitiless.

A string of seed-pearls girdled her soft, rosy throat. Her fingers
blazed with the fire of her rings. Her nails were sharp as claws. In the
well-harmonized rhythms of her every attitude, in all her perfect
modelings, in every nuance and detail of her--wonderful plaything for
men's dalliance--Enrique, untutored country boy though he was, discerned
a supremely selfish ego. He realized this woman was one of those
emotionless creatures of willfulness, wholly self-centered, who are
incapable of sorrow.

Don Manuel's mood was brusque, with that brusquerie of a rich, healthy
man who has a pretty woman in tow, as he exclaimed:

"Well now, Enrique, how do you like my Little Goldie? I bet you never
saw anything like her, back home!" Triumphantly he added: "She doesn't
cost much, either. When I first met her, I asked: 'What shall I give
you?' She answered: 'A box at the Teatro Real.' Why, that's a bagatelle!
Only a little more than thirteen hundred pesetas for fourteen plays. And
here we are. I tell you the little lady doesn't ask much."

Darles answered nothing. His emotions choked h