New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and
daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the
only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart of a
trifler.

If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco (I should hate to see all
these changes) it would be Antonia. And the true reason for that--why
not be frank about it?--the true reason is that I have modelled her on
my first love. How we, a band of tallish school-boys, the chums of her
two brothers, how we used to look up to that girl just out of the
schoolroom herself, as the standard-bearer of a faith to which we all
were born but which she alone knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching
hope! She had perhaps more glow and less serenity in her soul than
Antonia, but she was an uncompromising Puritan of patriotism with no
taint of the slightest worldliness in her thoughts. I was not the only
one in love with her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her scathing
criticism of my levities--very much like poor Decoud--or stand the brunt
of her austere, unanswerable invective. She did not quite
understand--but never mind. That afternoon when I came in, a shrinking
yet defiant sinner, to say the final good-bye I received a hand-squeeze
that made my heart leap and saw a tear that took my breath away. She was
softened at the last as though she had suddenly perceived (we were such
children still!) that I was really going away for good, going very far
away--even as far as Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from our eyes in the
darkness of the Placid Gulf.

That's why I long sometimes for another glimpse of the "beautiful
Antonia" (or can it be the Other?) moving in the dimness of the great
cathedral, saying a short prayer at the tomb of the first and last
Cardinal-Archbishop of Sulaco, standing absorbed in filial devotion
before the monument of Don Jose Avellanos, and, with a lingering,
tender, faithful glance at the medallion-memorial to Martin Decoud,
going out serenely into the sunshine of the Plaza with her upright
carriage and her white head; a relic of the past disregarded by men
awaiting impatiently the Dawns of other New Eras, the coming of more
Revolutions.

But this is the idlest of dreams; for I did understand perfectly well at
the time that the moment the breath left the body of the Magnificent
Capataz, the Man of the People, freed at last from the toils of love and
wealth, there was nothing more for me