The image of his wife, vivacious and attractive, as in the early years of their marriage, kept rising before him.  It was not a resurrection of the old love; that would have been impossible....  But his remorse made him see her, idealized by distance, with all her qualities of a sweet and modest woman.

He wished to reestablish the cordial relations of other times, to have all the past pardoned, so that she would no longer look at him with hatred, believing him responsible for the death of her son.

In reality she was the only woman who had loved him sincerely, as she was able to love, without violence or passional exaggeration, and with the tranquillity of a comrade.  The other women no longer existed.  They were a troop of shadows that passed through his memory like specters of visible shape but without color.  As for that last one, that Freya whom bad luck had put in his way—...  How the captain hated her!  How he wished to meet her and return a part of the harm she had done him!...

Upon seeing his wife, Ulysses imagined that no time had passed by.  He found her just as at parting, with her two nieces seated at her feet, making interminable, complicated blonde lace upon the cylindrical pillows supported on their knees.

The only novelty of the captain’s stay in this dwelling of monastic calm was that Don Pedro abstained from his visits.  Cinta received her husband with a pallid smile.  In that smile he suspected the work of time.  She had continued thinking of her son every hour, but with a resignation that was drying her tears and permitting her to continue the deliberate mechanicalness of existence.  Furthermore, she wished to remove the impression of the angry words, inspired by grief,—­the remembrance of that scene of rebellion in which she had arisen like a wrathful accuser against the father.  And Ferragut for some days believed that he was living just as in past years when he had not yet bought the Mare Nostrum and was planning to remain always ashore.  Cinta was attentive to his wishes and obedient as a Christian wife ought to be.  Her words and acts revealed a desire to forget, to make herself agreeable.

But something was lacking that had made the past so sweet.  The cordiality of youth could not be resuscitated.  The remembrance of the son was always intervening between the two, hardly ever leaving their thoughts.  And so it would always be!

Since that house could no longer be a real home to him, he again began to await impatiently the hour of sailing.  His destiny was to live henceforth on the ship, to pass the rest of his days upon the waves like the accursed captain of the Dutch legend, until the pallid virgin wrapped in black veils—­Death—­should come to rescue him.

While the steamer finished loading he strolled through the city visiting his cousins, the manufacturers, or remaining idly in the cafes.  He looked with interest on the human current passing through the Ramblas in which were mingled the natives of the country and the picturesque and absurd medley brought in by the war.