Read "The Mirror of the Sea" by Joseph Conrad online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was not _Tremolino's_ fault that the syndicate depended so much on the wit and wisdom and the information of Doña Rita. She had taken a little furnished house on the Prado for the good of the cause-_Por el Rey_! She was always taking little houses for somebody's good, for the sick or the sorry, for broken-down artists, cleaned-out gamblers, temporarily unlucky speculators-_vieux amis_-old friends, as she used to explain apologetically, with a shrug of her fine shoulders.
Whether Don Carlos was one of the "old friends," too, it's hard to say. More unlikely things have been heard of in smoking-rooms. All I know is that one evening, entering incautiously the salon of the little house just after the news of a considerable Carlist success had reached the faithful, I was seized round the neck and waist and whirled recklessly three times round the room, to the crash of upsetting furniture and the humming of a valse tune in a warm contralto voice.