Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) онлайн

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But, as though fearful that his friend might possibly think of him as “romantic,” Robledo hastened to smile sceptically.

“When I want women they are not hard to find ... and then I am free to go my way. Why complicate my life by taking into it a companion I don’t need?”

As the three friends were leaving the theatre one evening, Elena expressed a desire to go to a certain Montmartre cabaret that was causing a stir in Paris by the magnificence of its new decorations, in the Persian style of the Thousand and One Nights, adapted of course to the architectural necessities of a faubourg cabaret.

Green lights gave the effect of a sea cave to the high-ceilinged room in which the crowd looked as livid as so many corpses, recent victims of the hangman’s art. Two orchestras working in shifts filled the air with jerking and broken rythms. Violins and banjos vied with indefinable instruments in the production of disharmonies, while automobile horns, drums and cymbals, contributed to a pandemonium in which heavy objects crashed on the ground, rails squeaked, and the barnyard squawked.