the display of celebrities was over for the day, rose from their places.  Their coaches were ready outside for a ride through the Castellana.  That strange woman in the diplomatic gallery had also risen to go.  But no:  she was giving her hand to her companion, bidding him good-bye.  Now she had resumed her seat, continuing the busy movement of her fan that annoyed Rafael so.  Thanks for the compliment, my fair one I Though as far as he was concerned, the whole audience might have gone, leaving only the president and the mace-bearers.  Then he could speak without any fear at all!  The public galleries, especially, unnerved him.  Nobody had moved there.  Those workingmen were without doubt waiting for the rebuttal of his answer from their venerable spokesman.  Rafael felt that the swarthy heads above all those dirty blouses and shirt-fronts without collars or neckties were eyeing him with stony coldness.  “Now we’ll see what this ninny has got to say!”

Rafael began with a eulogy on the immaculate character, the political importance and the profound learning of that venerable septuagenarian who still had strength to battle consistently and nobly for the lost cause of his youth.  An exordium of this nature was the regular procedure.  That was how “the Chief” did things.  And as he spoke, Rafael’s eyes turned anxiously upon the clock.  He wanted to be long, very long.  If he did not talk for an hour and a half or two hours he would feel disgraced.  Two hours was the least to be expected from a man of his promise.  He had seen party chiefs and faction leaders go it for a whole afternoon, from four to eight, hoarse and puffing, sweating like diggers in a sewer, with their collars wilted to rags, watching the great hall-clock with the intentness of a man waiting to be hanged.  “Still an hour left before closing time!” a speaker’s friends would say.  And the great orator, like a wearied horse, but a thoroughbred, would find new energy somewhere and start on another lap, round and round, repeating what he had already said a dozen times, summarizing the two ideas he had managed to produce in four hours of sonorous chatter.  With duration as the test of quality, no one on the government had yet succeeded in equaling a certain redheaded deputy of the Opposition who was forever heckling the Premier, and could talk, if need be, three days in succession for four hours a day.

Rafael had heard people praise the conciseness and the clarity of new-fangled oratory in the parliaments of Europe.  The speeches of party leaders in Paris or in London took up never more than half a column in a newspaper.  Even the old man he was answering had adopted, to be original in everything, that selfsame conciseness:  every sentence of his contained two or three ideas.  But the member from Alcira would not be led astray by such niggardly parsimony.  He believed that ponderousness and extension were qualities indispensable to eloquence.  He must fill a whole issue of the Congressional Record, to impress his friends back home in the District.  So he talked and talked on, trying deliberately to avoid ideas.  Those he had he would keep in reserve as long as possible, certain that the longer he held them prisoner the longer and more solemn would his oration be.