left the house and went to the Casino. He entered it with the desperate
air of a man about to throw himself into the sea.

In the principal rooms he found various people talking and discussing
different subjects. In one group they were solving with subtle logic
difficult problems relating to bulls; in another, they were discussing
the relative merits of different breeds of donkeys of Orbajosa and
Villahorrenda. Bored to the last degree, Pepe Rey turned away from these
discussions and directed his steps toward the reading-room, where he
looked through various reviews without finding any distraction in the
reading, and a little later, passing from room to room, he stopped,
without knowing why, at the gaming-table. For nearly two hours he
remained in the clutches of the horrible yellow demon, whose shining
eyes of gold at once torture and charm. But not even the excitement of
play had power to lighten the gloom of his soul, and the same tedium
which had impelled him toward the green cloth sent him away from
it. Shunning the noise, he found himself in an apartment used as an
assembly-room, in which at the time there was not a living soul, and
here he seated himself wearily at a window overlooking the street.

This was very narrow, with more corners and salient angles than houses,
and was overshaded throughout its whole extent by the imposing mass of
the cathedral that lifted its dark and time-corroded walls at one end
of it. Pepe Rey looked up and down and in every direction; no sign
of life--not a footstep, not a voice, not a glance, disturbed the
stillness, peaceful as that of a tomb, that reigned everywhere. Suddenly
strange sounds, like the whispering of feminine voices, fell on his ear,
and then the rustling of curtains that were being drawn, a few words,
and finally the humming of a song, the bark of a lap-dog, and other
signs of social life, which seemed very strange in such a place.