And Iglésia told how the first time he had seen her he had taken her from a distance for a child, a girl de Reixach might have taken out of boarding school on Sundays and dressed up as a woman out of fatherly weakness (which would have explained that indefinable sensation of uneasiness you felt at first, he explained in his own way, as at the sight of something vaguely, indefinably monstrous, embarrassing, like those children dressed up, travestied in clothes copied from grownups’, like sacrilegious and disturbing parodies of adults, prejudicial both to childhood and to the human condition), and he said that that was what had struck him first: that childish, innocent, fresh, somehow pre-virginal quality, so that it had taken him a minute to notice, to realize—seized then by a kind of stupor, feeling a wave of something furious, scandalized and fierce rising in him—that she was not only a woman but the most Woman of all the women he had ever seen, even in fantasy: “Even in films,” he said. “Fantastic!” (speaking of her not the way a man talks about a woman he has possessed, penetrated, held in his arms moaning and beside herself, but like some kind of alien creature, and alien not so much to himself, Iglésia (that is -although he had pushed her back, thrown her down, held her beneath him—above him by her situation, by money, by social position) as to the whole human race (including other women), therefore speaking of her in virtually the same words, the same intonations as if she were one of those objects among which he included probably film stars (deprived of all reality, save an imaginary one), horses, or even those things (mountains, boats, planes) to which the man who perceives through them the manifestations of the natural forces he is struggling against, attributes human reactions (anger, malignancy, treachery): beings (the horses, the celluloid goddesses, the motor cars) of a hybrid, ambiguous nature, not quite human, not quite object, inspiring both respect and irreverence by the combination, the compromise in them of disparate constitutive elements (real or supposed)—human and inhuman—which was doubtless why he talked about her the way horse dealers talk about their animals or mountain climbers about mountains, his manner both coarse and deferential, crude and delicate, his voice when he described her expressing a kind of vaguely scandalized stupefaction, but vaguely admiring and reproving at the same time, exactly like the time he had come up to examine Blum’s horse during a halt without managing to discover the blisters which should normally have been produced by the abominable way Blum saddled and rode, his big, round, incredulous, pensive, slightly bewildered eyes staring into nothingness while he was talking, staring, probably seeing again—with the same incredulous astonishment, the same disarmed reprobation with which he had looked at the horse’s back without discovering on it the sores that should have been there—the woman he was describing, or rather of whom he let the image, the memory be wrenched from him, which his reticence natural to men of the people, combined with the respect (not servile, since it hadn’t even occurred to him to turn back and look at the place where de Reixach had fallen, but merely timid) for his employers, would have prevented him from discussing if he hadn’t apparently been convinced of Corinne’s inhuman or non-human character, saying:) “I had to get close to her. Fantastic! Only then I realized why he couldn’t have cared less about what people might or might not think or say, and about looking like her father, and letting her ruin the horses just for the pleasure of pressing the chronometer button and moving her buttocks around in those jodhpurs he could only pay for with money when he would probably have preferred to have had them made out of gold if there had been a way to make jodhpurs out of . . .” And Blum: “Oh yes, and I suppose if he’d been able to find a couturier capable of shutting it up for him in a safe, and with a lock, one of those combination locks whose combination no one else would have known, when the first comer, the first number to come along, the first key to come along, did the trick just as . . .” and Georges: “Oh shut your mouth, that’s enough!” and to Iglésia: “And then it must have been after that story with the filly, I bet, that’s what decided her, that was when she . . . “ and Iglésia: “No, before. She . . . I mean we . . . I mean I think that’s why he was so eager to race her . . . Because I think he had suspected something. We had done it only once and no one could have seen us, but I think he had smelt something funny. Or maybe she had even arranged it so that he would half-guess it, short of throwing me out, because in those days I don’t think that would have made any difference to her. Or perhaps she hadn’t been able to keep one word, one remark from slipping out. And then he wanted to ride her . . .” And with no transition he began talking to them about the filly, the chestnut, with the same words he had used to describe the woman, saying: “That bastard” (and though he meant de Reixach there was nothing insulting in it, on the contrary: something like a promotion, raising him, doing him the honour of raising him to the rank of a jockey, that is, admitting he possessed a jockey’s qualities and consequently able to forget that he was his employer, using about him a word not pejorative but familiar, only tinged with a faint but affectionate nuance of blame, that he would have used for one of his own kind, that is, for one of his equals, saying then—in that nasal, plaintive and almost whining, almost childish voice which contrasted with his hard and caricatural ruffian’s face, his knife-blade nose, his skin or rather his yellowed leather, pitted with smallpox scars:) “That bastard, I told him he shouldn’t try to force her, to let her go, all he had to do was let her alone, let her forget as much as possible that he was on her back, and then she’d go all by herself. I told him: ‘It’s not my business to tell you how to ride, but you’re driving her too hard. A steeplechase isn’t a horse show: in the bunch she’ll take all the jumps she’d never be willing to take any other way. So it’s not worth driving her so hard. It doesn’t matter so much for the others, but she can’t stand it . . .’”