gh the glass windows of
the shops while his head was swimming with the dizziness of hunger.
He could endure his misery while he wandered alone through the cruel
selfishness of civilisation; but the most horrible days were those
in which he shared his vagabond poverty with Lucy, his gentle and
melancholy companion.

Gabriel spoke of the Englishwoman as of a dead sister.

"Had you known her, Sagrario, you would have loved her. She was a
strong woman, a brave companion, united to me more by the community of
thought than by carnal attraction. I loved her when I first saw her.
I hardly know if it was love that we felt; poets have written so many
lies about love, and have falsified it in such an exaggerated way,
that I do not for certain know what it is."

He spoke to the young woman of love, explaining it according to his
beliefs. Goethe had defined it as an "elective affinity," speaking
as a man of science and not as a poet, using the term that chemistry
gives to the tendency of two substances to unite and form a distinct
product. Two beings between whom no affinity existed could meet
through false laws of life in perpetual contact, but they could not
mix or merge into one another. This happened more often than not
between the individuals of different sexes who peopled the earth; a
passing sentimentality could exist, or carnal caprice, but seldom
love. The poor invalid Lucy was his affinity; they met and they loved.
In their pity for human miseries, their hatred of inequalities and
injustice, their self-abnegation in the cause of the humble and
unfortunate they were equal; they were not only united by their hearts
but by their brains.

She was plain, with a soft and sad plainness that seemed to Luna the
supreme ideal of beauty in the midst of that struggling world of
unfortunates and victims. She was the image of a woman of the people
reared in the workmen's slums of great cities, anaemic from the
mephitic air of the den in which she was born and from bad and
insufficient food, with a wretched body, all feminine graces paralysed
in their development by the rough work done in her childhood. Her
lips, that great ladies paint red, were violet; the only beauty of her
face lay in her eyes, those windows of sorrow, made larger by the cold
nights passed in the street from horror of the scenes she saw in her
childhood; her father, drunken, with the brutal wish of a workman to
forget, who, after imagining that his tavern was a