Good-night."
The servant was leaving the room, when the balconies of the house
across the way lighted up. They opened wide and soon there came the
strains of a tender prelude from a guitar.
"Petra! Petra!" cried Dona Casiana. "Come here. Eh? Over in that
Isabel's house ... You can tell they have visitors."
The domestic went to the balcony and gazed indifferently at the house
opposite.
"Now that's what pays," the landlady went on. "Not this nasty
boarding-house business."
At this juncture there appeared in one of the balconies of the other
house a woman wrapped in a flowing gown, with a red flower in her
hair. A young man in evening dress, with swallow-tail coat and white
vest, clasped her tightly about the waist.
"That's what pays," repeated the landlady several times.
This notion must have stirred her ill-humour, for she added in an
irritated voice:
"Tomorrow I'll have some plain words with that priest and those
gadabout daughters of Dona Violante, and all the rest who are behind
in their payments. To think a woman should have to deal with such a
tribe! No! They'll laugh no more at me! ..."
Petra, without offering a reply, said good-night again and left the
room. Dona Casiana continued to grumble, then ensconced her rotund
person in the rocker and dozed off into a dream about an establishment
of the same type as that across the way; but a model establishment,
with luxuriously appointed salons, whither trooped in a long
procession all the scrofulous youths of the clubs and fraternities,
mystic and mundane, in such numbers that she was compelled to install
a ticket-office at the entrance.
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