Desnoyers no longer cared to live in the country.  For twenty years, now, he had been the head of an enormous agricultural and stock raising business, overseeing hundreds of men in the various ranches.  The parcelling out of the old man’s fortune among Elena and the other legatees had considerably constricted the radius of his authority, and it angered him to see established on the neighboring lands so many foreigners, almost all Germans, who had bought of Karl.  Furthermore, he was getting old, his wife’s inheritance amounted to about twenty millions of dollars, and perhaps his brother-in-law was showing the better judgment in returning to Europe.

So he leased some of the plantations, handed over the superintendence of others to those mentioned in the will who considered themselves left-handed members of the family—­of which Desnoyers as the Patron received their submissive allegiance—­and moved to Buenos Aires.

By this move, he was able to keep an eye on his son who continued living a dissipated life without making any headway in his engineering studies.  Then, too, Chichi was now almost a woman—­her robust development making her look older than she was—­and it was not expedient to keep her on the estate to become a rustic senorita like her mother.

Dona Luisa had also tired of ranch life, the social triumphs of her sister making her a little restless.  She was incapable of feeling jealous, but material ambitions made her anxious that her children should not bring up the rear of the procession in which the other grandchildren were cutting such a dashing figure.

During the year, most wonderful reports from Germany were finding their way to the Desnoyers home in the Capital.  “The aunt from Berlin,” as the children called her, kept sending long letters filled with accounts of dances, dinners, hunting parties and titles—­many high-sounding and military titles;—­“our brother, the Colonel,” “our cousin, the Baron,” “our uncle, the Intimate Councillor,” “our great-uncle, the Truly Intimate.”  All the extravagances of the German social ladder, which incessantly manufactures new titles in order to satisfy the thirst for honors of a people divided into castes, were enumerated with delight by the old Romantica.  She even mentioned her husband’s secretary (a nobody) who, through working in the public offices, had acquired the title of Rechnungarath, Councillor of Calculations.  She also referred with much pride to the retired Oberpedell which she had in her house, explaining that that meant “Superior Porter.”

The news about her children was no less glorious.  The oldest was the wise one of the family.  He was devoted to philology and the historical sciences, but his sight was growing weaker all the time because of his omnivorous reading.  Soon he would be a Doctor, and before he was thirty, a Herr Professor.  The mother lamented that he had not military aspirations, considering that his tastes had somewhat distorted the lofty destinies of the family.  Professorships, sciences and literature were more properly the perquisites of the Jews, unable, because of their race, to obtain preferment in the army; but she was trying to console herself by keeping in mind that a celebrated professor could, in time, acquire a social rank almost equal to that of a colonel.