ancy at times that, in this respect, I am more worthy
of censure than Pepita, supposing her even to be worthy of censure at
all.

For, as regards myself, I have been invested with the lesser orders; I
have cast out from my soul the vanities of the world; I have received
the tonsure; I have consecrated myself to the service of the altar. Yet
I have a future full of ambition before me, and I dwell with pleasure on
the thought that this future is within my reach. I please myself in
thinking that the conditions I possess for it are real and efficacious;
though I call humility to my aid, at times, to save me from an
overweening self-confidence.

To what, on the other hand, does this woman aspire, and what are her
hopes? I censure her for the care she takes of her hands, for regarding
her beauty, perhaps, with complacency; I almost censure her for her
neatness, for the attention she bestows on her dress; for a certain
indefinable coquetry there is in the very modesty and simplicity of her
attire. But what! must virtue be slovenly? Must holiness be unclean? Can
not a pure and clean soul rejoice in the cleanliness and purity of the
body also? Is there not something reprehensible in the displeasure with
which I regard the neatness and purity of Pepita? Is this displeasure,
perchance, because she is to be my step-mother? But, perhaps, she does
not wish to be my step-mother! Perhaps she does not love my father! It
is true, indeed, that women are incomprehensible. It may be that in her
secret heart she already feels inclined to return my father's
affection, and marry him, though, in accordance with the saying that
"what is worth much, costs much," she chooses first to torment him with
her affected coldness, to reduce him to unquestioning submission, to put
his constancy to the proof, and then means to end by quietly saying Yes.
We shall see.

What there is no question about is, that our garden-party was decorously
merry. We talked of flowers, of fruit, of grafts, of planting, and of
innumerable other things relating to husbandry, Pepita displaying her
knowledge of agriculture in rivalry with my father, with myself, and
with the reverend vicar, who listens with open mouth to every word she
utters, and declares that in the seventy-odd years of his life, and
during his many wanderings, in the course of which he has traversed
almost the whole of Andalusia, he has never known a woman more discreet
or more judicious in all she thinks