is library, possesses an understanding open to the light
of truth, but is wanting in original power, and thus the problems and
questions Pepita presents to him open before him new horizons and new
paths, nebulous and vague indeed, and which he did not even imagine to
exist, which he is not able to follow with exactitude, but whose
vagueness, novelty, and mystery enchant him.

The vicar is not ignorant of the danger of all this, and that he and
Pepita expose themselves to fall, without knowing it, into some heresy;
but he tranquillizes his conscience with the thought that, although very
far from being a great theologian, he has his catechism at his fingers'
ends, he has confidence in God that he will illuminate his spirit, and
he hopes not to be led into error, and takes it for granted that Pepita
will follow his counsels, and never deviate from the right path.

Thus do both form to themselves a thousand poetical conceptions, full of
charm, although vague, of all the mysteries of our religion and the
articles of our faith. Great is the devotion they profess to the most
holy Virgin, and I am astonished to see how they are able to blend the
popular idea or conception of the Virgin with some of the sublimest
theological thoughts.

From what the vicar relates, I can perceive that Pepita Ximenez's soul,
in the midst of its apparent calmness and serenity, is transfixed by the
sharp arrow of suffering; there is in it a love of purity in
contradiction with her past life. Pepita loved Don Gumersindo as her
companion, as her benefactor, as the man to whom she owed everything;
but she is tortured, she is humiliated by the recollection that Don
Gumersindo was her husband.

In her devotion to the Virgin there may be detected a feeling of painful
humiliation, of suffering, of sadness, produced by the recollection of
her ignoble and childless marriage.

Even in her adoration of the _Infant Jesus_, in the beautiful carved
image she has in her house, there is something of maternal love that
lacks an object on which to expend its tenderness, of maternal love that
seeks this object in a being not born of sin and impurity.

The vicar says that Pepita worships the _Infant Jesus_ as her God, but
that she also loves him with the maternal tenderness she would feel for
a son, if she had one, and whom she had no cause to regard with any
other feeling than affection. The vicar sees that Pepita, in her prayers
to the Holy Virgin, and in her c