Standing in the corridor, he would feel the nervous flutter of the journalists about him—­those poor, intelligent, attractive, young fellows, who found it so hard to make a living.  From the press-gallery they would sit and look down on the legislators the way birds in the treetops must look down on the wretchedness of the streets below, laughing at the nonsense those solemn baldpates were talking!  Could a farce on the stage be more amusing?

To Rafael those “intellectuals” seemed to bring a breeze from out of doors into the close, sordid, vitiated air of the Chamber.  They stood for the thought of the world outside—­the idea fatherless, unsponsored, the aspiration of the great masses—­a breath of fresh air in the sick-room of a chronic invalid forever dying, forever unburiable.

Their judgment always differed from that of the country’s representatives.  His Excellency senor don What’s-his-Name was in their eyes, a mud-eel, and in their lingo a congrio; the illustrious orator What-do-you-call-him, who took up a sixteen-page sheet in the Congressional Record every time he spoke, was a percebe, a “barnacle on the keel of Progress”; every act of parliament struck them as a bit of balderdash, though, to hold their jobs, they praised it to the skies in their articles.  And why was it that the country, in some mysterious way, would always think eventually what those boys thought, so long, and only so long, as they remained boys?  Would they have to come down from their scats in the press-gallery to the red benches on the floor before the real will of the country would make itself felt?

Rafael Brull finally realized that national opinion was present on the floor, among his fellow members, also, but like a mummy in a sarcophagus:  bound hand and foot in rhetoric and conventional utterance, spiced, embalmed with proprieties that made any outburst of sincerity, any explosion of real feeling, evidence of “bad taste!”

In reality everything was going well with the Ship of State.  The nation had passed from action to talk, and from talk to passivity, and from passivity to resignation.  The era of revolutions was gone forever.  The infallible system of government had proved to be this mechanism of pre-arranged “crises” and amicable exchanges of patronage between Liberals and Conservatives, each member of the party in power and each member of the party out of power knowing just what he was to say and just what he was to get.

So, in that palace of over-ornate architecture, as pretentious and as showy as the mansion of a millionaire parvenu, Rafael was condemned to spend his lifetime, foregoing the blue sky and the flowering fields and orchards of Alcira that a family ambition might be realized.

Nothing noteworthy had occurred during those eight years.  His life had been a muddy, monotonous stream, with neither brilliancy nor beauty in its waters, lazily meandering along, like the Jucar in winter.  As he looked back over his career as a “personage,” he could have summed it up in three words:  he had married.