Upon coming out from the stupefaction of her grief, Dona Cristina looked around her with aversion.  Why should she linger on in Valencia?  Since she could no longer be with the man who had brought her to this country, she wanted to return to her own people.  The poet Labarta would look after her properties that were not so valuable nor numerous as the income of the notary had led them to suppose.  Don Esteban had suffered great losses in extravagant business speculations good-naturedly accepted, but there was still left a fortune sufficient to enable his wife to live as an independent widow among her relatives in Barcelona.

In arranging her new existence, the poor lady encountered no opposition except the rebelliousness of Ulysses.  He refused to continue his college course and he wished to go to sea, saying that for that reason he had studied to become a pilot.  In vain Dona Cristina entreated the aid of relatives and friends, excluding the Triton, whose response she could easily guess.  The rich brother from Barcelona was brief and affirmative, “But wouldn’t that bring him in the money?"...  The Blanes of the coast showed a gloomy fatalism.  It would be useless to oppose the lad if he felt that to be his vocation.  The sea had a tight clutch upon those who followed it, and there was no power on earth that could dissuade him.  On that account they who were already old were not listening to their sons who were trying to tempt them with the convenience of life in the capital.  They needed to live near the coast in agreeable contact with the dark and ponderous monster which had rocked them so maternally when it might just as easily have dashed them to pieces.

The only one who protested was Labarta.  A sailor?... that might be a very good thing, but a warlike sailor, an official of the Royal Armada.  And in his mind’s eye the poet could see his godson clad in all the splendors of naval elegance,—­a blue jacket with gold buttons for every day, and for holiday attire a coat trimmed with galloon and red trappings, a pointed hat, a sword....

Ulysses shrugged his shoulders before such grandeur.  He was too old now to enter the naval school.  Besides he wanted to sail over all oceans, and the officers of the navy only had occasion to cruise from one port to another like the people of the coast trade, or even passed years seated in the cabinet of the naval executive.  If he had to grow old in an office, he would rather take up his father’s profession of notary.

After seeing Dona Cristina well established in Barcelona, surrounded with a cortege of nephews fawning upon the rich aunt from Valencia, her son embarked as apprentice on a transatlantic boat which was making regular trips to Cuba and the United States.  Thus began the seafaring life of Ulysses Ferragut, which terminated only with his death.

The pride of the family placed him on a luxurious steamer, a mail-packet full of passengers, a floating hotel on which the officials were something like the managers of the Palace Hotel, while the real responsibility devolved upon the engineers, who were always going below, and upon returning to the light, invariably remained modestly in a second place, according to a hieratical law anterior to the progress of mechanics.