hysicians,
professors, lawyers, who had not studied anything for years, approved
complacently. For a woman it was not at all bad. And she, lifting her
glasses to her eyes from time to time to relish the doctor's beauty,
talked with a pedantic slowness about protoplasms, and the reproduction
of the cells, the cannibalisms of the phagocytes, catarine, anthropoid
and pithecoid apes, discoplacentary mammals and the Pithecanthropos,
treating the mysteries of life with friendly confidence, repeating
strange scientific words, as if they were the names of society folks,
who had dined with her the evening before.

The handsome Doctor Monteverde, according to her, was head and shoulders
above all the scholars of universal reputation.

Their books made her tired, she could not make anything out of them, in
spite of the fact that the doctor admired them greatly. To make up for
this, she had read Monteverde's book over and over, and she recommended
this wonderful work to her lady friends, who in matters of reading never
went beyond the novels in popular magazines.

"He is a scholar," said the countess one afternoon while talking alone
with Renovales. "He's just beginning now, but I will push him ahead and
he will turn out to be a genius. He has extraordinary talent. I wish you
had read his book. Are you acquainted with Darwin? You aren't, are you?
Well, he is greater than Darwin, much greater."

"I can believe that," said the painter. "Your Monteverde is as pretty as
a baby and Darwin was an ugly old fellow."

The countess hesitated whether to get serious or to laugh, and finally
she shook her lorgnette at him.

"Keep still, you horrid man. After all, you're a painter. You can't
understand tender friendships, pure relations, fraternity based on
study."

How bitterly the painter laughed at this purity and fraternity! His eyes
were good and Concha, for her part, was no model of prudence in hiding
her feelings. Monteverde was her lover, just as formerly a musician had
been, at a period when the countess talked of nothing but Beethoven and
Wagner, as if they were callers, and long before that a pretty little
duke, who gave private amateur bull-fights at which he slaughtered the
innocent oxen after greeting lovingly the Alberca woman, who, wrapped in
a white mantilla, and decorated with pinks, leaned out of the box in the
grandstand. Her relations with the doctor were almost common talk. That
was amply proved by the fury with whi