llible system of government had proved to be this mechanism of
pre-arranged "crises" and amicable exchanges of patronage between
Liberals and Conservatives, each member of the party in power and each
member of the party out of power knowing just what he was to say and
just what he was to get.

So, in that palace of over-ornate architecture, as pretentious and as
showy as the mansion of a millionaire _parvenu_, Rafael was condemned to
spend his lifetime, foregoing the blue sky and the flowering fields and
orchards of Alcira that a family ambition might be realized.

Nothing noteworthy had occurred during those eight years. His life had
been a muddy, monotonous stream, with neither brilliancy nor beauty in
its waters, lazily meandering along, like the Jucar in winter. As he
looked back over his career as a "personage," he could have summed it up
in three words: he had married.

Remedios was his wife. Don Matias was his father-in-law. He was
wealthy. He had control over a vast fortune, for he exercised despotic
rule over his wife's peasant father, the most fervent of his admirers.
His mother seemed to have put the last of her strength into the
arrangement of that "marriage of convenience." She had fallen into a
senile decrepitude that bordered on dotage. Her sole evidence of being
alive was her habit of staying in church until the doors were closed and
she could stay no longer. At home she did nothing but recite the rosary,
mumbling away in some corner of the house, and taking no part in the
noisy play of her grandchildren. Don Andres had died, leaving Rafael
sole "boss" of "the Party." He had had three children. They had had
their teeth, their measles, their whooping-cough. These episodes, with a
few escapades of that brother of Remedios, who feared Rafael's paunch
and bald head more than the wrath of don Matias, were the only
distractions in a thoroughly dull existence.

Every year he bought a new piece of land. He felt a thrill of pride when
from the top of San Salvador--that Hermitage, alas, of such desperate
and unfading memory!--he looked down upon the vast patches of land with
orange-trees in straight rows and fenced in by green walls, that all,
all, belonged to him. The joy of ownership, the intoxication of property
had gone to his head.

As he entered the old mansion, entirely made over now, he felt the same
sense of well-being and power. The old chest in which his mother used to
keep her money stood where it