“I’ll be there directly.”

And the deputy bent low over his desk in the writing-room of the Congress, went on with his last letter, adding one more envelope to the heap of correspondence piled up at the end of the table, near his cane and his silk hat.

This was his daily grind, the boresome drudgery of every afternoon; and around him, with similar expressions of disgust on their faces, a large number of the country’s representatives were busy at the same task.  Rafael was answering petitions and queries, stifling the complaints and acknowledging the wild suggestions that came in from the District—­the endless clamor of the voters at home, who never met the slightest annoyance in their various paths of life without at once running to their deputy, the way a pious worshipper appeals to the miracle-working saint.

He gathered up his letters, gave them to an usher to mail, and sauntering off with a counterfeit sprightliness that was more counterfeit as he grew fatter and fatter with the years, walked through to the central corridor, a prolongation of the lobby in front of the Salon de Conferencias.

The Honorable senor don Rafael Brull, member from Alcira, felt as much at ease as if he were in his own house when he entered that corridor,—­a dark hole, thick with tobacco smoke, and peopled with black suits standing around in groups or laboriously elbowing their way through the crowds.

He had been there eight years; though he had almost lost count of the times he had been “duly elected” in the capricious ups and downs of Spanish politics, which give to Parliaments only a fleeting existence.  The ushers, the personnel of the Secretariat, the guards and janitors, treated him with deferential intimacy, as a comrade on a somewhat higher level, but as much of a fixture as they were to the Spanish Congress.  He was not one of those men who are miraculously washed into office on the crest of a reform wave, but never succeed in repeating the trick, and spend the rest of their lives idling on the sofas of the Conference Chamber, with wistful memories of lost greatness, waiting to enter Congress afternoons, to preserve their standing as ex-deputies, and forever hoping that their party will some day return to power, so that once again they may sit on the red benches.  No, don Rafael Brull was a gentleman with a District all his own:  he came with a clean, undisputed and indisputable certificate of election, whether his own party or the Opposition were in the saddle.  For lack of other discoverable merit in him, his fellow-partisans would say:  “Brull is one of the few who come here on honest returns.”  His name did not figure brilliantly in the Congressional record, but there was not an employee, not a journalist, not a member of the “ex-honorables” who, on noticing the word “Brull” on all the committees, did not at once exclaim:  “Ah, yes!  Brull ... of Alcira.”