Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) онлайн

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“I don’t know what you mean,” he said finally. “But if you are talking about my wife, please remember that she bears my name, and that ... I am very fond of her....”

In the pause that followed a distance increasing with the minutes separated the two men. Robledo made a determined effort to renew the cordiality of their relations.

“Life over there is hard. We are very far from having even the most ordinary comforts of civilization. But the desert is a great sea of energy that cleanses and strengthens those of us who go to it as refugees from the old world, or from ourselves. A plunge into it prepares us for a new kind of life, a life such as you know nothing of.... You find there men who have escaped from all sorts of catastrophes, men from everywhere. Yet all differences of race, birth, and breeding are washed away. Only the fundamentals remain. There men show themselves for what they are, the strength that is in them freed from all the bonds that entangle you here.... And that is why I call my country what it really is—‘the land of all the world’. It is waiting for us, Federico!”