r
get a sight of you." Whereupon Rafael would give up his rides--his sole
pleasure practically--and plunge into a thick smoke-laden atmosphere of
noise and shouting, where he would have to answer questions of the most
illustrious members of the party. They would sit around, filling their
coffee-saucers with cigar-ash, disputing as to which was the better
orator, Castelar or Canovas, and, in case of a war between France and
Germany, which of the two would win--idle subjects that always provoked
disagreements and led to quarrels.

The only time he entered into voluntary relations with "the Party" was
when he took his pen in hand and manufactured for the Brull weekly a
series of articles on "Law and Morality" and "Liberty and Faith,"--the
rehashings of a faithful, industrious plodder at school, prolix
commonplaces seasoned with what metaphysical terminology he remembered,
and which, from the very reason that nobody understood them, excited
the admiration of his fellow partisans. They would blink at the articles
and say to don Andres:

"What a pen, eh? Just let anyone dare to argue with him.... Deep, that
noodle, I tell you!"

Nights, when his mother did not oblige him to visit the home of some
influential voter who must be kept content, he would spend reading, no
longer, however, as in Valencia, books lent him by the canon, but works
that he bought himself, following the recommendations of the press, and
that his mother respected with the veneration always inspired in her by
printed paper sewed and bound, an awe comparable only to the scorn she
felt for newspapers, dedicated, every one of them, as she averred, to
the purpose of insulting holy things and stirring up the brutal passions
of "the rabble."

These years of random reading, unrestrained by the scruples and the
fears of a student, gradually and quietly shattered many of Rafael's
firm beliefs. They broke the mould in which the friends of his mother
had cast his mind and made him dream of a broader life than the one
known to those about him. French novels transported him to a Paris that
far outshone the Madrid he had known for a moment in his graduate days.
Love stories awoke in his youthful imagination an ardor for adventure
and involved passions in which there was something of the intense love
of indulgence that had been his father's besetting sin. He came to dwell
more and more in the fictitious world of his readings, where there were
elegant, perfumed, cleve