zealous medical official, "let him make
his stake and as soon as he has six or seven thousand pesos he can
go back home and live there in peace. After all, what does it matter
to you if he does deceive the unwary Indians? They should be more
careful! He's a poor devil--don't take the bread from his mouth--be a
good Spaniard!" This official was a good Spaniard and agreed to wink at
the matter, but the news soon reached the ears of the people and they
began to distrust him, so in a little while he lost his practise and
again saw himself obliged almost to beg his daily bread. It was then
that he learned through a friend, who was an intimate acquaintance of
Dona Victorina's, of the dire straits in which that lady was placed
and also of her patriotism and her kind heart. Don Tiburcio then saw
a patch of blue sky and asked to be introduced to her.

Dona Victorina and Don Tiburcio met: _tarde venientibus ossa_,
[118] he would have exclaimed had he known Latin! She was no longer
passable, she was passee. Her abundant hair had been reduced to a knot
about the size of an onion, according to her maid, while her face was
furrowed with wrinkles and her teeth were falling loose. Her eyes,
too, had suffered considerably, so that she squinted frequently in
looking any distance. Her disposition was the only part of her that
remained intact.

At the end of a half-hour's conversation they understood and accepted
each other. She would have preferred a Spaniard who was less lame,
less stuttering, less bald, less toothless, who slobbered less when he
talked, and who had more "spirit" and "quality," as she used to say,
but that class of Spaniards no longer came to seek her hand. She
had more than once heard it said that opportunity is pictured as
being bald, and firmly believed that Don Tiburcio was opportunity
itself, for as a result of his misfortunes he suffered from premature
baldness. And what woman is not prudent at thirty-two years of age?

Don Tiburcio, for his part, felt a vague melancholy when he thought of
his honeymoon, but smiled with resignation and called to his support
the specter of hunger. Never had he been ambitious or pretentious; his
tastes were simple and his desires limited; but his heart, untouched
till then, had dreamed of a very different divinity. Back there in his
youth when, worn out with work, he lay doom on his rough bed after
a frugal meal, he used to fall asleep dreaming of an image, smiling
and tender. Af