Only the considerate treatment of his wife, who surrounded him with assiduous care as though wishing to compensate for their long separations, made the situation bearable.  Furthermore, his conscience was enjoying a certain satisfaction in being a land-father, taking much interest in the life of his son who was beginning to prepare to enter the institute, looking over his books, and aiding him in understanding the notes.

But even these pleasures were not of long duration.  The family gatherings in his home or at his relatives’ bored him unspeakably; so did the conversations with his cousins and nephews about profits and business deals, or about the defects of centralized tyranny.  According to them, all the calamities of heaven and earth were coming from Madrid.  The governor of the province was the “Consul of Spain.”

These merchants interrupted their criticisms only to listen in religious silence to Wagner’s music banged out on the piano by the girls of the family.  A friend with a tenor voice used to sing Lohengrin in Catalan.  Enthusiasm made the most excitable roar, “the hymn ... the hymn!” It was not possible to misunderstand.  For them there was only one hymn in existence, and in a trilling undertone they would accompany the liturgic music of Los Segadores (The Reapers). [The revolutionary song of Catalunia, originated by a band of reapers in the seventeenth century.]

Ulysses used to recall with homesickness his life as commander of a transatlantic liner,—­a wide, universal life of incessant and varied horizons, and cosmopolitan crowds.  He could see himself detained on deck by groups of elegant maidens who would beg him for new dances in the coming week.  His footsteps were surrounded with white fluttering skirts, veils that waved like colored clouds, laughter and trills, Spanish chatter that appeared set to music:—­all the frolicsome jargon of a cage of tropical birds.

Ex-presidents of the South American republics,—­generals or doctors who were going to Europe to rest,—­used to relate to him on the bridge, with Napoleonic gravity, the principal events in their history.  The business men starting out for America confided to him their stupendous plans:—­rivers turned from their courses, railroads built across the virgin forests, monstrous electric forces extracted from huge waterfalls varying in breadth, cities vomited from the desert in a few weeks, all the marvels of an adolescent world that desires to realize whatever its youthful imagination may conceive.  He was the demi-urge of this little floating world:  he disposed of joy and love as the spirit moved him.