The Blanes family had gone much to sea.  They loved it as intensely as did the doctor, but with a cold and silent love, appreciating it less for its beauty than for the profits which it offered to the fortunate.  Their trips had been to America, in their own sailing vessels, importing sugar from Havana and corn from Buenos Ayres.  The Mediterranean was for them only a port that they crossed carelessly on departure and arrival.  None of them knew the white Amphitrite even by name.

Moreover, they did not have the devil-may-care and romantic appearance of the bachelor of the Marina, ready to live in the water like an amphibian.  They were gentlemen of the coast who, having retired from the sea, were entrusting their barks to captains who had been their pilots,—­middle class citizens who never laid aside the cravat and silk cap that were the symbols of their high position in their natal town.

The gathering-place of the rich was the Athenaeum,—­a society that in spite of its title offered no other reading matter than two Catalunian periodicals.  A large telescope mounted on a tripod before the door used to fill the club members with pride.  For the uncles of Ulysses, it was enough merely to put one eyebrow to the glass to be able to state immediately the class and nationality of the ship that was slipping along over the distant horizon line.  These veterans of the sea were accustomed to speak only of the freight cargoes, of the thousands and thousands of dollars gained in other times with only one round trip, and of the terrible rivalry of the steamship.

Ulysses kept hoping in vain that sometimes they would allude to the Nereids and other poetic beings that the Triton had conjured around his promontory.  The Blanes had never seen these extraordinary creatures.  Their seas contained fish only.  They were cold, economical men of few words, friends of order and social preferment.  Their nephew suspected that they had the courage of men of the sea but without boasting or aggressiveness; their heroism was that of traders capable of suffering all kinds of adventures provided their stock ran no risks, but becoming wild beasts if any one attacked their riches.

The members of the Athenaeum were all old, the only masculine beings in the village.  Besides them there were only the carbineers installed in the barracks and various calkers making their mallets resound on the hull of a schooner ordered by the Blanes brothers.

All the active men were on the sea.  Some were sailing to America as crew of the brigs and barks of the Catalunian coast.  The more timid and unfortunate ones were always fishing.  Others, more valiant and anxious for ready money, had become smugglers on the French coast whose shores began on the other side of the promontory.

In the village there were only women, women of all kinds:—­women seated before their doors, making lace on great cylindrical pillows on their knees, along whose length their bobbins wove strips of beautiful openwork, or grouped on the street corners in front of the lonely sea where their men were, or speaking with an electric nervousness that oftentimes would break out suddenly in noisy tempests.