Esclavita was crossing the hall when she heard her young master’s voice calling her:

“Esclavita!”

“I am coming.”

“Come quickly! Your presence is required to relieve me from an appalling situation.”

The girl entered the student’s room and found him standing in his shirt sleeves in the middle of the floor, his waist-coat in one hand while the other was tightly clasped, as if it held some precious object.

“A moment ago,” he cried tragically, opening his hand, in which was a small mother-of-pearl button, “this precious button flew with lightning-like swiftness from my collar. Can you secure it in its place again without inflicting with the murderous steel a mortal wound upon my throat?”

Esclavita smiled, and, putting her hand into her pocket, took out her needle-case, spool, and thimble. This latter was open at both ends, like the thimbles used by the peasantry. She put it on quickly, with equal quickness threaded her needle, knotted the thread, and took between her thumb and forefinger the little pearl button. She pulled out the threads where the button had come off, set the button in its place, and inserted the needle. Here began the difficulties of the undertaking. It was impossible to draw the needle straight through without pricking the young man’s chin, smooth and clean as a woman’s. He pretended to be making desperate efforts to assist in the operation, accompanying them by comical grimaces and cries of, “Help! She is severing my carotid artery! she is piercing my jugular vein! she is performing the dangerous operation of tracheotomy upon me without my having the croup!” And the girl, smiling, but undisturbed, would say, “Hold your head up a little—take care, now—there, that will do; I will soon be through.” At last, with a triumphant gesture, she twisted the thread around the button to form the stem, fastened it by a stitch or two, and then broke it off.

“Hurrah! Victory! Now button it for me.”

The slender fingers, marked with the pricking of the needle, passed over the throat of the student, who broke into fresh cries:

“Oh! Oh! Oh! she is p-i-i-i-nching me.”

As soon as the collar was buttoned, however, he said softly, as if he were begging her to render him some important and difficult service:

“Esclavita, deign to encircle my neck with this halter.”

Esclavita took the silk necktie, and as she put it around the young man’s neck their glances met. During the previous operations this had not happened, for Rogelio’s head had been turned aside, as far as his fits of laughing would permit; but now it could not be avoided, for Esclavita’s face was raised, and Rogelio, taller than she, looked, of necessity, into her eyes, green, shot with golden lights; and the parting of the hair, straight and even, like a furrow cut through a field of ripe grain; and her rounded forehead, smooth and fine, and the little blue veins in her temples and eyelids. He inhaled her sweet breath, that intoxicated him for a moment, as if he had opened a jar of oxygen.

It was but for a moment, but it was a moment which seemed to Rogelio a year. Childhood, with its butterfly lightness, its blue and silvery skies, was left behind forever. Esclavita, having finished tying the cravat, drew back to a little distance, the better to observe the effect of the bow.

It was as if the communication between the wire and the battery had been interrupted. Rogelio came to his senses. “How disgraceful!” he thought. “What a vexation for my mother!”

The precepts of morality, which others learn as a rational necessity and a compulsory duty, or as a part of their religion, Rogelio, who as an only son, had been petted and spoiled, had learned through the medium of his feelings. All his ideas of decorum, of goodness, of rectitude, had come to him by this indirect but pleasant path. “Ah! what a grief it would be to me, child, if you were to do such or such a thing!” his mother used to say. “Heavens! what a mortification for me if you should commit this or that fault!” Thus it was that, without being conscious of it, what Rogelio first considered in all his actions was the effect they would be apt to produce on his mother’s feelings; and this was now his first thought when the vertigo passed away that had obscured his reason, while the girl was close beside him. When Esclavita had left the room his very want of confidence in himself made him take an honorable resolve, that of avoiding fresh temptations and still greater dangers. These resolutions are difficult to keep when the temptation is close at hand. Rogelio felt his first desire return to him continually, and the same fumes mount into his brain, like puffs of hot air. At table; when she came to his room, bringing the light, or some message, or his linen, he could not help devouring her with his eyes, following the perfect lines of her slender form, noting the grace and lightness of her movements. The stronger and more passionate his desire, the more embarrassed did he feel himself in the girl’s presence. When with her it seemed to him impossible that he should ever venture to pay her a serious compliment; while in the solitude of his own room at night, unable to sleep, and tossing about restlessly in his narrow bed, he felt himself equal to any undertaking, no absurdity seemed to him unreasonable, and he even thought—strange effect of passion—that it was his bounden duty to do what in the light of day he regarded as a crime and an act of madness. “And then,” he said to himself, “no one can call me a child any longer, and I shall be fully convinced myself that I am not one.” This absurd idea vanished in the morning, when his mother, according to her old affectionate habit, brought him his chocolate. When he saw DoÑa Aurora, dressed in her plaid morning gown, come into his room with the tray in her hands, when he tasted the fresh biscuit, the spoiled child felt all the power of the moral law imposing itself upon him with apodictic force; and precepts, unknown or denied a few moments before, now presented themselves to him clearly, significantly, plainly. “To give mamma cause for grief—it makes me shudder even to think of it; it would be unpardonable. Even though she should not discover it I should fancy she was reading it in my eyes, in my very breathing. And she would discover it,—she would discover it, there is not a doubt of it. Mamma is very shrewd, easy-going and good-natured as she appears. No one can throw dust in her eyes. She knows me so well that before the words were out of my mouth she can tell what I am going to say. As she cares for no one and thinks of nothing but me. God grant I may never give her cause for grief.”

Thus this criminal in thought studied DoÑa Aurora’s countenance attentively, fearful lest some glance he might chance to cast at Esclavita should betray him. At times he exposed himself to the risk of attracting attention by going to the opposite extreme, affecting not to look at the girl, and avoiding even the contact of her dress when she waited on him at table. It is true that this simple contact affected him so powerfully as to cause him pain from the intensity of the emotion. His was the passionate desire of youth that has not learned either how to control itself or how to attain its object. After avoiding Esclavita for two or three days, he would devise some excuse to go and surprise her in the little room where she ironed and where the basket containing the mending was kept, and when he was there, the only thing that occurred to him to do was to sit down in a chair and cheat his passionate longing by contemplating the girl who, rosy and perspiring, her right arm curved out firmly, leaned with all her weight on the iron as she smoothed the bosoms and the cuffs of his shirts. When the impulse to embrace her became too violent, Rogelio would rise and take refuge in his little study. There, on the polished desk were the hateful text-books, printed on brown paper with worn and blurred type,

exhaling aridity and tedium from their musty leaves and gray covers. Rogelio had never had any liking for these books, but now, whenever he opened one of them to go over a lesson, a thick fog seemed to envelop his faculties, and a sort of moral dissolution to take place in his spirit, where a rebellious voice would whisper softly such heresies as these: “Go, child, give up those futilities, renounce that dry, worthless, empty, sapless science of the schools. Real life and humanity are something altogether different from this. This pretended nourishment for the mind is a collection of antiquities, the rind of a lemon which the hand of history has been squeezing dry for nineteen centuries. All that you are studying is out of date. They wish to store your mind with mummified remains, dusty rags, and old cobwebs. They wish to fill your head with antiquated juridical rubbish, and they desire that at a bound you should be as old as your mother’s guests, Lain Calvo, NuÑo Rasura, and the honorable Puppet. They would have you be of wood, like him. No, you are of flesh and blood, you are a man; life calls to you, and life, at your age, in default of a pursuit which would unfold your faculties harmoniously is—Esclavita.”

To these vague promptings, translated here into plain and vulgar speech, the student responded by yawning, rising nervously from his chair, and taking down from the book-shelf a novel or the latest number of Madrid Comico, which, throwing himself on the bed, he would eagerly devour, seeking thus to forget his feverish longings.

He had not the resource of a cigar, for he belonged to the younger generation who do not smoke; and who, unless God take pity upon them, will come in time to faint like an Englishwoman at the smell of a Havana. He was deprived of this sweet soother of impatience, this great counselor in trouble, this powerful sedative, this most spiritual of material distractions. One day he thought about it a great deal. “What would happen to me if I should smoke?” he said to himself. “The first thing would be that I should grow dizzy, perhaps sick at my stomach—yes, there is not the least doubt of it. And then mamma would know that I had been smoking, from the smell. No, the remedy is worse than the disease.”

The idea of smoking, which pleased him, because there was something manly and rakish about it, suggested another expedient, more effective, besides being easy and pleasant to put in practice. How was it that it had never occurred to him before when it was so simple, so extremely simple, and even so natural and right, and especially when it would be so efficacious as a consolation in his present suffering. “Why, the only thing to be wondered at is, that I should not have a sweetheart already,” he said to himself. “Every one I know has one. And they are quite right. If I had one, I should get rid of these crazy notions. I shall take a sweetheart, yes, indeed. There is nothing wrong in having a sweetheart, and even if mamma should find it out, she will not be vexed on account of it. One nail drives out another. That will be my chief distraction.”

The post being created, it now only remained to find some one to fill it. Rogelio passed in mental review all the young ladies with whom he was acquainted. Some of them were ugly; others were already engaged; this one was too old; that one was never to be met outside her house; one would turn him into ridicule; another would require him to prove his affection for her by performing some difficult task. He remembered at last that in a little street opening on to the Calle Ancha de San Bernardo, just in front of his house, there lived three or four young girls, daughters of an employee in the Colonial Department. They were not bad-looking, especially the youngest, a pale blonde, whose complexion, eyes, and hair were all the same color, which was becoming to her, giving her a certain resemblance to the Infanta Eulalia. Rogelio looked at her occasionally, receiving prompt payment of every one of his glances. “The little blonde will suit me,” he thought. “It will not be necessary for me even to move from the dining-room.” Accordingly, the very day on which the thought occurred to him he took up his post before breakfast by the window, and, opening it slightly, looked toward the windows of the third floor opposite. At one of them was the blonde, dressed in a soiled and crumpled morning-gown of dotted percale. On the railing of the window hung various undergarments, more than half worn, drying, and on a bureau he could see some bottles covered with dust, the empty cage of a lark, some old rags, and an old shoe. As he contemplated this interior, in no wise resembling a Dutch interior, Rogelio abandoned his purpose of looking there for a sweetheart. He remained for the space of ten minutes or so, perplexed. Then he said to himself: “I shall look somewhere else, that’s all. As for remaining without a sweetheart, I cannot make up my mind to that; it would be absurd.”