Cinta, that was her name, appeared to have known him all his life.  He had been the object of her conversations with Dona Cristina when they spent monotonous hours together weaving lace, as was the village custom.  Passing her room, Ulysses noticed there some of his own portraits at the time when he was a simple apprentice aboard a transatlantic liner.  Cinta had doubtless taken them from her aunt’s room, for she had been admiring this adventurous cousin long before knowing him.  One evening the sailor told the two women how he had been rescued on the coast of Portugal.  The mother listened with averted glance, and with trembling hands moving the bobbins of her lace.  Suddenly there was an outcry.  It was Cinta who could not listen any longer, and Ulysses felt flattered by her tears, her convulsive laments, her eyes widened with an expression of terror.

Ferragut’s mother had been greatly concerned regarding the future of this poor niece.  Her only salvation was matrimony, and the good senora had focused her glances upon a certain relative a little over forty who needed this young girl to enliven his life of mature bachelorhood.  He was the wise one of the family.  Dona Cristina used to admire him because he was not able to read without the aid of glasses, and because he interlarded his conversation with Latin, just like the clergy.  He was teaching Latin and rhetoric in the Institute of Manresa and spoke of being transferred some day to Barcelona,—­glorious end of an illustrious career.  Every week he escaped to the capital in order to make long visits to the notary’s widow.

“He doesn’t come on my account,” said the good senora, “who would bother about an old woman like me?...  I tell you that he is in love with Cinta, and it will be good luck for the child to marry a man so wise, so serious....”

As he listened to his mother’s matrimonial schemes, Ulysses began to wonder which of a professor of rhetoric’s bones a sailor might break without incurring too much responsibility.

One day Cinta was looking all over the house for a dark, worn-out thimble that she had been using for many years.  Suddenly she ceased her search, blushed and dropped her eyes.  Her glance had met an evasive look on her cousin’s face.  He had it.  In Ulysses’ room might be seen ribbons, skeins of silk, an old fan—­all deposited in books and papers by the same mysterious reflex that had drawn his portraits from his mother’s to his cousin’s room.

The sailor now liked to remain at home passing long hours meditating with his elbows on the table, but at the same time attentive to the rustling of light steps that could be heard from time to time in the near-by hallway.  He knew about everything,—­spherical and rectangular trigonometry, cosmography, the laws of the winds and the tempest, the latest oceanographic discoveries—­but who could teach him the approved form of addressing a maiden without frightening her?...  Where the deuce could a body learn the art of proposing to a shy girl?...