friends of the family, don Ramon's doings were
spoken of as scandalous actually--a duel after a quarrel at cards; then
a father and a brother--common workingmen in flannel shirts!--who had
sworn they would kill him if he didn't marry a certain girl he had been
taking to her shop by day and to dance-halls by night.

Old Brull made up his mind to tolerate these escapades of his son no
longer; and he made him give up his studies. Ramon would not be a
lawyer; well, after all, one didn't have to have a degree to be a man of
importance. Besides the father felt he was getting old; it was hard for
him to look after the working of his orchards personally. He could make
good use of that son who seemed to have been born to impose his will
upon everybody around him.

For some time past don Jaime had had his eye on the daughter of a friend
of his. The Brull house showed noticeable lack of a woman's presence.
His wife had died shortly after his retirement from business, and the
old codger stamped in rage at the slovenliness and laziness displayed by
his servants. He would marry Ramon to Bernarda--an ugly, ill-humored,
yellowish, skinny creature--but sole heiress to her father's three
beautiful orchards. Besides, she was conspicuous for her industrious,
economical ways, and a parsimony in her expenditures that came pretty
close to stinginess.

Ramon did as his father bade him. Brought up with all the ideas of a
rural skinflint, he thought no decent person could object to marrying an
ugly bad-tempered woman, so long as she had plenty of money.

The father-in-law and the daughter-in-law understood each other
perfectly. The old man's eyes would water at sight of that stern,
long-faced puritan, who never had much to say in the house, but went
into high dudgeon over the slightest waste on the part of the domestics,
scolding the farmhands for the merest oversight in the orchards,
haggling and wrangling with the orange drummers for a _centime_ more or
less per hundredweight. That new daughter of his was to be the solace of
his old age!

Meantime, the "prince" would be off hunting every morning in the nearby
mountains and lounging every afternoon in the cafe; but he was no longer
content with the admiration of the idlers hanging around a billiard
table, nor was he taking part in the game upstairs. He was frequenting
the circles of "serious" people now, had made friends with the _alcalde_
and was talking all the time of the great need fo