"Ay, ay!" Ricardo ejaculated for the third time, more and more
enlightened and perplexed. "Can't bear to talk about it--so bad as that?
And yet I would bet she isn't a miracle to look at."

Schomberg made a gesture as if he didn't know, as if he didn't care.
Then he squared his shoulders and frowned at vacancy.

"Swedish baron--h'm!" Ricardo continued meditatively. "I believe the
governor would think that business worth looking up, quite, if I put it
to him properly. The governor likes a duel, if you will call it so; but
I don't know a man that can stand up to him on the square. Have you ever
seen a cat play with a mouse? It's a pretty sight!"

Ricardo, with his voluptuously gleaming eyes and the coy expression,
looked so much like a cat that Schomberg would have felt all the alarm
of a mouse if other feelings had not had complete possession of his
breast.

"There are no lies between you and me," he said, more steadily than he
thought he could speak.

"What's the good now? He funks women. In that Mexican pueblo where we
lay grounded on our beef-bones, so to speak, I used to go to dances of
an evening. The girls there would ask me if the English caballero in
the posada was a monk in disguise, or if he had taken a vow to the
sancissima madre not to speak to a woman, or whether--You can imagine
what fairly free-spoken girls will ask when they come to the point of
not caring what they say; and it used to vex me. Yes, the governor funks
facing women."

"One woman?" interjected Schomberg in guttural tones.

"One may be more awkward to deal with than two, or two hundred, for that
matter. In a place that's full of women you needn't look at them unless
you like; but if you go into a room where there is only one woman, young
or old, pretty or ugly, you have got to face her. And, unless you are
after her, then--the governor is right enough--she's in the way."

"Why notice them?" muttered Schomberg. "What can they do?"

"Make a noise, if nothing else," opined Mr. Ricardo curtly, with the
distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed, nothing
is more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty and
absorbing card game. "Noise, noise, my friend," he went on forcibly;
"confounded screeching about something or other, and I like it no more
than the governor does. But with the governor there's something else
besides. He can't stand them at all."

He paused to reflect on this psychological phenomenon,