He came up to her and said, "Pilar!" sharply.
The woman raised her head and looked up at him. "Oh," she said.
"You have terminated already?"
"Art thou ill?" he asked and bent down by her.
"_Que va_," she said.
"I was asleep."
"Pilar," Maria, who had come up, said and kneeled down by her.
"How are you?
Are you all right?"
"I'm magnificent," Pilar said but she did not get up.
She looked at the two of them.
"Well, _Ingles_," she said.
"You have been doing manly tricks again?"
"You are all right?" Robert Jordan asked, ignoring the words.
"Why not?
I slept.
Did you?"
"No."
"Well," Pilar said to the girl.
"It seems to agree with you."
Maria blushed and said nothing.
"Leave her alone," Robert Jordan said.
"No one spoke to thee," Pilar told him.
"Maria," she said and her voice was hard.
The girl did not look up.
"Maria," the woman said again.
"I said it seems to agree with thee."
"Oh, leave her alone," Robert Jordan said again.
"Shut up, you," Pilar said without looking at him.
"Listen, Maria, tell me one thing."
"No," Maria said and shook her head.
"Maria," Pilar said, and her voice was as hard as her face and there was nothing friendly in her face.
"Tell me one thing of thy own volition."
The girl shook her head.
Robert Jordan was thinking, if I did not have to work with this woman and her drunken man and her chicken-crut outfit, I would slap her so hard across the face that--.
"Go ahead and tell me," Pilar said to the girl.
"No," Maria said.
"No."
"Leave her alone," Robert Jordan said and his voice did not sound like his own voice.
I'll slap her anyway and the hell with it, he thought.
Pilar did not even speak to him.
It was not like a snake charming a bird, nor a cat with a bird.
There was nothing predatory. Nor was there anything perverted about it.
There was a spreading, though, as a cobra's hood spreads.
He could feel this.
He could feel the menace of the spreading.
But the spreading was a domination, not of evil, but of searching.
I wish I did not see this, Robert Jordan thought.
But it is not a business for slapping.
"Maria," Pilar said.