“You meat-cows,” she said, in her level, crystal-clear tones; “you know nothing of a man. Your men are maromeros. They are fit only to roll cigarettes in the shade until the sun strikes and shrivels them up. They drone in your hammocks and you comb their hair and feed them with fresh fruit. My man is of no such blood. Let him drink of the wine. When he has taken sufficient of it to drown one of your flaccitos he will come home to me more of a man than one thousand of your pobrecitos. My hair he smoothes and braids; to me he sings; he himself removes my zapatos, and there, there, upon each instep leaves a kiss. He holds—Oh, you will never understand! Blind ones who have never known a man.”
Sometimes mysterious things happened at night about Dicky’s shop. While the front of it was dark, in the little room back of it Dicky and a few of his friends would sit about a table carrying on some kind of very quiet negocios until quite late. Finally he would let them out the front door very carefully, and go upstairs to his little saint. These visitors were generally conspirator-like men with dark clothes and
