The president, so restless and vigilant, so ever-ready with watch and bell in hand when any of the Opposition had the floor, was now sitting back in his chair with his eyes shut, dozing away with the confidence of a stage director who is sure the show will go off without a hitch.  The panes of the glass dome were glowing under the rays of the sun, but they allowed only a diffuse, green light, a discreet, soft, crypt-like clarity to seep through into the Chamber that lay below in monastic calm.  Through the windows over the president’s chair, Rafael glimpsed patches of the blue sky, drenched in the gentle light of an afternoon of Springtime.  A white dove was hovering in the perspective of those blue squares.

Rafael felt a slackening of his powers of endurance, as if an irresistible languor were stealing over him.  The sweet smile of Nature peering at him through the transoms of that gloomy, parliamentary tomb had taken him back to his orange-orchards, and to his Valencian meadows covered with flowers.  He felt a curious impulse to finish his speech in a few hasty words, grab his hat and flee, losing himself out among the groves of the Royal Gardens.  With that sun and those flowers outside, what was he doing in that hole, talking of things that did not concern him in the least?...  But he successfully passed this fleeting crisis.  He ceased rummaging among the bundles of documents piled up on the bench, stopped thumbing papers so as to hide his perturbation, and waving the first sheet that came to his hand, he went on.

The intention of the gentleman in opposing this appropriation was not hidden from him.  On this matter he had his own, his private and personal ideas.  “I understand that su senoria, in here proposing retrenchment, is really seeking to combat religious institutions, of which he is a declared enemy.”

And as he reached this point, Rafael dashed wildly into the fray.  He was treading firm and familiar ground.  All this part of the speech he had prepared, paragraph by paragraph:  a defense of Catholicism, an apology pro fide, so intimately bound up with the history of Spain.  He could now use impassioned outbursts and tremors of lyric enthusiasm, as if he were preaching a new crusade.

On the Opposition benches he caught the ironic glitter of a pair of spectacles, the convulsions of a white chin quivering over two folded arms, as if a kindly, indulgent smile had greeted his parade of so many musty and faded commonplaces.  But Rafael was not to be intimidated.  He had gotten away with an hour almost!  Forward, to “Section Two” of the outline, the part about the great national and Christian epic!  And he began to reel off visions of the cave of Covadonga; the fantastic tree of the Reconquest “where the warrior hung up his sword, the poet his harp,” and so on and so on, for everybody hung up something there; seven centuries of wars for the cross, a rather long time, believe me, gentlemen, during which Saracen impiety was expelled from Spanish soil!  Then came the great triumphs of Catholic unity.  Spain mistress of almost the whole world, the sun never allowed to set on Spanish domains; the caravels of Columbus bearing the cross to virgin lands; the light of Christianity blazing forth from the folds of the national banner to shed its illuminating rays throughout the earth.