If she gave him a handsome wife and handsome children, and made men envious of him, and filled him with good things, for she could cook more than tortillas-she felt he would have no right to complain.

She meant him to marry her--and Quebec was very near! "A beggar in a strange land, without a home, without a friend--oh, my broken life!" she whispered wistfully to the sunset.
It was not all acting, for the past reached out and swept over her, throwing waves of its troubles upon the future.

She was that saddest of human beings, a victim of dual forces which so fought for mastery with each other that, while the struggle went on, the soul had no firm foothold anywhere.

That, indeed, was why her Carvillho Gonzales, who also had been dual in nature, said to himself so often, "I am a devil," and nearly as often, "I have the heart of an angel." "Tell me all about your life, my friend," Jean Jacques said eagerly.
Now his eyes no longer hurried here and there, but fastened on hers and stayed thereabouts--ah, her face surely was like pictures he had seen in the Louvre that day when he had ambled through the aisles of great men's glories with the feeling that he could not see too much for nothing in an hour.
"My life?
Ah, m'sieu', has not my father told you of it ?" she asked.
He waved a hand in explanation, he cocked his head quizzically.
"Scraps--like the buttons on a coat here and there--that's all," he answered.

"Born in Andalusia, lived in Cadiz, plenty of money, a beautiful home,"-- Carmen's eyes drooped, and her face flushed slightly--"no brothers or sisters--visits to Madrid on political business--you at school--then the going of your mother, and you at home at the head of the house.