can buy! Take a good
look at yourself! You're ugly, to put it mildly, my dear boy! You're
lost that attractive slimness of your younger days. Your dreams make me
laugh! A passion at this late date! The idyll of a middle-aged siren and
a bald-headed father of a litter of children, with a paunch, with a
paunch, with a paunch! Oh, Rafael! Ha, ha, ha!"

The cruel mocker! How she laughed! How she was avenging herself. Rafael
grew angry at this cutting, ironic resistance. He began to flame with a
more excited passion.... The ravages of time made no difference. Could
not Love work miracles! He loved her more than he had ever loved her in
the olden days. He felt a mad hunger for her. Passion would give them
back the fires of youth. Love was like a springtime that brings new sap
to branches grown numb in the winter's cold. Let her say "Yes," and on
the instant she would behold the miracle, the resurrection of their
slumbering past, the awakening of their souls to the future of love!

"And your wife? And your children?" Leonora asked, brutally, as if she
wished to bring him back to realities, with a smarting lash from a whip.

But Rafael was now beside himself, drunk with the nearness of all that
beauty, and with the waves of perfume that filled the interior of the
carriage.

Wife? Family? He would leave everything for her: family, future,
position. It was she he needed to live and be happy!

"I will go with you; everybody is a stranger to me when I think of you.
You, you alone, are my life, my love!"

"Many thanks," Leonora answered curtly. "I could not accept such a
sacrifice.... Besides, all that sanctity of the home you were just
talking about a few moments ago in the Chamber? And all that Christian
morality, without which civilization would go to the damnation bow wows!
How I laughed when I heard you say that. How you were stuffing those
poor ninkampoops!..."

And again she laughed cruelly, at the contrast between his pious words
in Congress and his mad idea of forsaking everything to follow her
around the world. Oh, the hypocrite! She had felt, as she sat listening
to him, that his speech was a pack of lies, a mess of conventional
trumpery and platitudes! The only one there who had spoken with any real
sincerity, any real virtue, was that little old man, whom she had
listened to with veneration because he had been one of her father's
idols!

Rafael was crushed with bitter shame. Leonora's flat refusal, her
pitile