Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) онлайн

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Some of Elena’s allusions puzzled Robledo. She had never, so she told him, been in America, yet, one afternoon as they sipped their tea at the Ritz, she mentioned a trip through San Francisco when she was a little girl. On other occasions she would mention places in remote parts of the world, or persons well known in contemporary society as though she knew them intimately; and he never succeeded in finding out how many languages she knew.

“I speak everything!” had been her answer when Robledo asked her one day how many languages she could use. And her anecdotes made him wonder.... She had always “heard So-and-So tell this joke;” yet the engineer had his doubts about the real source of her rather daring stories.

“Where hasn’t this woman been?” he thought to himself. “Apparently she has lived a thousand lives in a few years. Can all this have happened when she was the wife of that Russian personage?”

His attempts to sound his friend on the subject of the Marquise had only one result. They showed that Torre’s confidence in his wife hedged him round like a thick wall of credulity. It was impossible to scale this wall or make the slightest breach in it. He would never discover the truth about Elena from her husband. But he did learn that since the day he had met her in London Torre knew nothing about his wife beyond what she herself had told him.