Hearing that Alday would not return till evening or till the following
day, I asked his wife to lend or give me a horse to proceed on my
journey. This, however, she could not do; then she added, very
graciously, that while all the men were away my presence in the house
would be a comfort to her, a man always being a great protection. The
arrangement did not strike me as one very advantageous to myself, but,
as I could not journey very well to Montevideo on foot, I was compelled
to sit still and wait for Alday's return.
It was dull work talking to those two women in the kitchen. They were
both great talkers, and had evidently come to a tacit agreement to
share their one listener fairly between them, for first one, then the
other would speak with a maddening monotony. Alday's wife had six
favourite, fine-sounding words--_elements, superior, division,
prolongation, justification,_ and _disproportion_. One of these
she somehow managed to drag into every sentence, and sometimes she
succeeded in getting in two. Whenever this happened the achievement
made her so proud that she would in the most deliberate cold-blooded
way repeat the sentence again, word for word. The strength of the old
woman lay in dates. Not an occurrence did she mention, whether it
referred to some great public event or to some trivial domestic incident
in her own _rancho_, without giving the year, the month, and the
day.
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