Remedios was his wife.  Don Matias was his father-in-law.  He was wealthy.  He had control over a vast fortune, for he exercised despotic rule over his wife’s peasant father, the most fervent of his admirers.  His mother seemed to have put the last of her strength into the arrangement of that “marriage of convenience.”  She had fallen into a senile decrepitude that bordered on dotage.  Her sole evidence of being alive was her habit of staying in church until the doors were closed and she could stay no longer.  At home she did nothing but recite the rosary, mumbling away in some corner of the house, and taking no part in the noisy play of her grandchildren.  Don Andres had died, leaving Rafael sole “boss” of “the Party.”  He had had three children.  They had had their teeth, their measles, their whooping-cough.  These episodes, with a few escapades of that brother of Remedios, who feared Rafael’s paunch and bald head more than the wrath of don Matias, were the only distractions in a thoroughly dull existence.

Every year he bought a new piece of land.  He felt a thrill of pride when from the top of San Salvador—­that Hermitage, alas, of such desperate and unfading memory!—­he looked down upon the vast patches of land with orange-trees in straight rows and fenced in by green walls, that all, all, belonged to him.  The joy of ownership, the intoxication of property had gone to his head.

As he entered the old mansion, entirely made over now, he felt the same sense of well-being and power.  The old chest in which his mother used to keep her money stood where it had always stood; but it was no longer devoted to savings hoarded slowly at the cost of untold sacrifice and privation to raise mortgages and temporize with creditors.  Never again had he tip-toed up in the dark to rifle it.  Now it was his own.  And at harvest time it became literally crammed with the huge rolls of banknotes his father-in-law paid over in exchange for the oranges of the Brull orchards.  And Rafael had a covetous eye on what don Matias had in the banks; for all that, too, would come to him when the old man died.  Acquisitiveness—­money and land—­had become his one, his ruling passion.  Monotony, meanwhile, had turned him into an accurate, methodical, meticulous machine; so that every night he would make out a schedule, hour for hour, of all that he would do on the following day.  At the bottom of this passion for riches conjugal contagion probably lay.  Eight years of unbroken familiarity had finally inoculated him with most of the obsessions and most of the predilections of his wife.

The shrinking, timorous little she-goat that used to gambol about with him in pursuit, the poor child who had been so wistful and downcast during the days of his wantonness, had now become a woman with all the imperious obstinacy, all the domineering superiority of the female of the species as it has evolved in the countries of the South.  Cleanliness and frugality in Remedios took the form of unendurable tyranny.  She scolded her husband if he brought the slightest speck of dust into the house on his shoes.  She would turn the place upside down, flay all the servants alive, if ever a few drops of oil were spilled from a jar, or a crumb of bread were wasted on the table.