get a sight of you.”  Whereupon Rafael would give up his rides—­his sole pleasure practically—­and plunge into a thick smoke-laden atmosphere of noise and shouting, where he would have to answer questions of the most illustrious members of the party.  They would sit around, filling their coffee-saucers with cigar-ash, disputing as to which was the better orator, Castelar or Canovas, and, in case of a war between France and Germany, which of the two would win—­idle subjects that always provoked disagreements and led to quarrels.

The only time he entered into voluntary relations with “the Party” was when he took his pen in hand and manufactured for the Brull weekly a series of articles on “Law and Morality” and “Liberty and Faith,”—­the rehashings of a faithful, industrious plodder at school, prolix commonplaces seasoned with what metaphysical terminology he remembered, and which, from the very reason that nobody understood them, excited the admiration of his fellow partisans.  They would blink at the articles and say to don Andres: 

“What a pen, eh?  Just let anyone dare to argue with him....  Deep, that noodle, I tell you!”

Nights, when his mother did not oblige him to visit the home of some influential voter who must be kept content, he would spend reading, no longer, however, as in Valencia, books lent him by the canon, but works that he bought himself, following the recommendations of the press, and that his mother respected with the veneration always inspired in her by printed paper sewed and bound, an awe comparable only to the scorn she felt for newspapers, dedicated, every one of them, as she averred, to the purpose of insulting holy things and stirring up the brutal passions of “the rabble.”

These years of random reading, unrestrained by the scruples and the fears of a student, gradually and quietly shattered many of Rafael’s firm beliefs.  They broke the mould in which the friends of his mother had cast his mind and made him dream of a broader life than the one known to those about him.  French novels transported him to a Paris that far outshone the Madrid he had known for a moment in his graduate days.  Love stories awoke in his youthful imagination an ardor for adventure and involved passions in which there was something of the intense love of indulgence that had been his father’s besetting sin.  He came to dwell more and more in the fictitious world of his readings, where there were elegant, perfumed, clever women, practicing a certain art in the refinement of their vices.

The uncouth, sunburned orchard-girls inspired him with revulsion as if they had been women of another race, creatures of an inferior genus.  The young ladies of the city seemed to him peasants in disguise, with the narrow, selfish, stingy instincts of their parents.  They knew the exact market price of oranges and just how much land was owned by each aspirant to their hand; and they adjusted their love to the wealth of the pretender, believing it the test of quality to appear implacable toward everything not fashioned to the mould of their petty life of prejudice and tradition.