When Don Pedro reached the height of his glorious career, the possession of a professorship in the institute of Barcelona, he used to visit Cinta every afternoon, passing an hour and a half in her parlor with chronometric exactitude.  Never did the slightest impure thought agitate the professor.  The past had fallen into oblivion....  But he needed to see daily the captain’s wife weaving laces with her two little nieces, as he had seen Ferragut’s widow years before.

He informed them of the most important events in Barcelona and in the entire world; they would comment together on the future of Esteban, and the former suitor used to listen rapturously to her sweet voice, conceding great importance to the details of domestic economy or descriptions of religious fiestas, solely because it was she who was recounting them.

Many times they would remain in a long silence.  Don Pedro represented patience, even temper, and silent respect, in that tranquil and immaculate house which lost its monastic calm only when its head presented himself there for a few days between voyages.

Cinta had accustomed herself to the professor’s visits.  At half-past three by the clock his footsteps could always be heard in the passageway.

If any afternoon he did not come, the sweet Penelope was greatly disappointed.

“I wonder what can be the matter with Don Pedro?” she would ask her nieces uneasily.

She oftentimes asked this question of her son; but Esteban, without exactly hating the visitor, appreciated him very slightly.

Don Pedro belonged to that group of gentlemen at the Institute whom the government paid to annoy youth with their explanations and their examinations.  He still remembered the two years that he had passed in his course, as in the torture chamber, enduring the torments of Latin.  Besides that, the professor was a timid man who was always afraid of catching cold, and who never dared to venture into the street on cloudy days without an umbrella.  Let people talk to him about courageous men!

“I don’t know,” he would reply to his mother.  “Perhaps he’s gone to bed with seven kerchiefs on his head.”

When Don Pedro returned, the house recovered its normality of a quiet and well-regulated clock.  Dona Cinta, after many consultations, had come to believe his collaboration indispensable.  The professor mildly supplemented the authority of the traveling husband, and took it upon himself to represent the head of the family in all outside matters....  Many times Ferragut’s wife would be awaiting him with impatience in order to ask his mature counsel, and he would emit his opinion in a slow voice after long reflection.

Esteban found it intolerable that this gentleman, who was no more than a distant relative of his grandmother, should meddle in the affairs of the house, pretending to oversee him as though he were his father.  But it irritated him still more to see him in a good humor and trying to be funny.  It made him furious to hear his mother called “Penelope” and himself “the young Telemachus."...  “Stupid, tedious old bore!”