missing? What is it that is not here?’”
He seemed to be gloating in his native darkness. It was curious, that though he spoke such good English, it seemed always foreign to her, more foreign than Doña Carlota’s Spanish.
“I can’t understand that people want to have everything, all life, no?—so safe and ready-made as in England and America. It is good to be awake. On the qui vive, no?”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“So I like it,” he said, “when Ramón tells the people the earth is alive, and the sky has a big bird in it, that you don’t see. I think it is true. Certainly! And it is good to know it, because then one is on the qui vive, no?
“But it’s tiring to be always on the qui vive,” she said.
“Why? Why tiring? No, I think, on the