tractedly. Zuniga laughs.

"You are thinking of the pretty girl Morales has just told you of," he
says. "The girl with the blue petticoat and the braid down her back!"

"Well, why not? I love her," Jose answers shortly. He hunches his
musket a little higher and wheels about. He doesn't specially care to
talk of Michaela or his mother, with these young scamps who are as
thoughtless as himself: he has preserved so much of self-respect; but
before he can answer again the factory bell rings. Dinner time! Jose
stands looking across, as every one else does, while the factory crowd
begins to tumble out, helter-skelter. All come singing, and the girls
smoking cigarettes, a good many of them being gipsies, like Carmen.
They are dressed in all sorts of clothes from dirty silk petticoats,
up to self-respecting rags. Carmen is somewhere in the midst of the
hullabaloo, and everybody is shouting for her.

Carmen leads in everything. She leads in good and she leads in bad.
She makes the best and the worst cigarettes, she is the quickest and
she is the slowest, as the mood moves her; and now, when she flashes
on to the stage in red and yellow fringes and bedraggled finery,
cigarette in mouth and bangles tinkling, opera has given to the stage
the supreme puzzle of humanity: the woman who does always what she
pleases, and who pleases never to do the thing expected of her!

The first man she sees when she comes from the factory is Jose. The
first thing that she pleases to do is to make Jose love her. It will
be good fun for the noon hour. She has her friends with her, Frasquita
and Mercedes, and all are in the mood for a frolic. They sing:

[Music:

Love is like any wood-bird wild,
That none can ever hope to tame;
And in vain is all wooing mild
If he refuse your heart to claim.
Naught avails, neither threat nor prayer,
One speaks me fair--the other sighs,
'Tis the other that I prefer,
Tho' mute, his heart to mine replies.]

While Carmen sings, her eyes do not leave Don Jose, and he is watching
her in spite of himself. The racket continues till the factory bell
rings to call the crowd back to work. Carmen goes reluctantly, and as
she goes, she throws a flower at Jose.

This little flower gave me a start
Like a ball aimed fair at my heart!

he says, half smiling, half seriously, as he picks it up. While he
stands thus, looking toward the factory, holding the flower, thinking
of