to the student's memory under the strange sensation of
violet perfume. He either did not remember, or he pretended not to
remember, the big, green eyes of the girl, her cruel and epigrammatic
little mouth, her firm, white body. But all the more did that violet
perfume possess him. He seemed to find his clothes, his hands, his
text-books, his poor little bed all odorous of violets. Still, even this
sweet illusion began to fade. Time began to blur it out, as it had
blurred his recollections of the girl. Darles wept a great deal. And one
night he wrote her a desperate, somewhat enigmatic note:

"I'm going to see you, to-morrow. If you won't let me in, I shall die.
Be merciful! My little room no longer smells of violets."

Alicia felt annoyed by the student's note. What was the idea of these
ostentatious hyperboles of passion? Could Darles have got it into his
head that what had happened--one of many adventures in her path--had
been anything but perfectly worthless and common? Alicia felt so sure of
this that her emotion was one of astonishment, more than of disgust.
Yet, in the beginning, her surprise caused her a certain pleasure.

"It really would be interesting," thought she, "if this boy should fall
in love with me like the hero of a play."

But the pleasure of such a curiosity hardly lasted a minute. Soon the
girl's cold, selfish spirit, that always traveled in straight lines
toward its own ends--the spirit and the will that never let themselves
be interfered with--reacted against this romantic possibility. Alicia
neither wanted to love nor be loved. For through the experiences of her
girl friends she had learned that love, with all its jealousies and
pains, is harshly cruel to lover and beloved, alike.

She attached no importance whatever to the caprice that had momentarily
thrown her into the student's arms. The evening before their first and
only night together, Darles had just happened to find her in one of
those fits of the blues, of eclectic relaxation, in which the volatile
feminine sense of ethics swings equidistant from good and evil. Her
virtues and her vices, alike, were arbitrary and without any exact
motive. If the student had perhaps had finer eyes, she would have
yielded to him, just the same; then too, perhaps if the emerald necklace
that, just a few minutes before, she and Don Manuel had been quarreling
about had been less desirable, she would have refused him.

The only certain thing about it al