"He's just beginning now, but I will push him ahead and
he will turn out to be a genius. He has extraordinary talent. I wish you
had read his book. Are you acquainted with Darwin? You aren't, are you?
Well, he is greater than Darwin, much greater."
"I can believe that," said the painter. "Your Monteverde is as pretty as
a baby and Darwin was an ugly old fellow."
The countess hesitated whether to get serious or to laugh, and finally
she shook her lorgnette at him.
"Keep still, you horrid man. After all, you're a painter. You can't
understand tender friendships, pure relations, fraternity based on
study."
How bitterly the painter laughed at this purity and fraternity! His eyes
were good and Concha, for her part, was no model of prudence in hiding
her feelings. Monteverde was her lover, just as formerly a musician had
been, at a period when the countess talked of nothing but Beethoven and
Wagner, as if they were callers, and long before that a pretty little
duke, who gave private amateur bull-fights at which he slaughtered the
innocent oxen after greeting lovingly the Alberca woman, who, wrapped in
a white mantilla, and decorated with pinks, leaned out of the box in the
grandstand. Her relations with the doctor were almost common talk. That
was amply proved by the fury with which the gentlemen of her coterie
pulled him to pieces, declaring that he was an idiot and that his book
was a Harlequin's coat, a series of excerpts from other men, poorly
basted together, with the daring of ignorance.
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