I managed to preserve an air of perfect unconcern. He wasn't a
fellow to whom one could talk of Dona Rita.
"You are a Basque," I said.
He admitted rather contemptuously that he was a Basque and even
then the truth did not dawn upon me. I suppose that with the
hidden egoism of a lover I was thinking of myself, of myself alone
in relation to Dona Rita, not of Dona Rita herself. He, too,
obviously. He said: "I am an educated man, but I know her people,
all peasants. There is a sister, an uncle, a priest, a peasant,
too, and perfectly unenlightened. One can't expect much from a
priest (I am a free-thinker of course), but he is really too bad,
more like a brute beast. As to all her people, mostly dead now,
they never were of any account. There was a little land, but they
were always working on other people's farms, a barefooted gang, a
starved lot. I ought to know because we are distant relations.
Twentieth cousins or something of the sort. Yes, I am related to
that most loyal lady. And what is she, after all, but a Parisian
woman with innumerable lovers, as I have been told."
|