had always stood; but it was no longer
devoted to savings hoarded slowly at the cost of untold sacrifice and
privation to raise mortgages and temporize with creditors. Never again
had he tip-toed up in the dark to rifle it. Now it was his own. And at
harvest time it became literally crammed with the huge rolls of
banknotes his father-in-law paid over in exchange for the oranges of the
Brull orchards. And Rafael had a covetous eye on what don Matias had in
the banks; for all that, too, would come to him when the old man died.
Acquisitiveness--money and land--had become his one, his ruling passion.
Monotony, meanwhile, had turned him into an accurate, methodical,
meticulous machine; so that every night he would make out a schedule,
hour for hour, of all that he would do on the following day. At the
bottom of this passion for riches conjugal contagion probably lay. Eight
years of unbroken familiarity had finally inoculated him with most of
the obsessions and most of the predilections of his wife.

The shrinking, timorous little she-goat that used to gambol about with
him in pursuit, the poor child who had been so wistful and downcast
during the days of his wantonness, had now become a woman with all the
imperious obstinacy, all the domineering superiority of the female of
the species as it has evolved in the countries of the South. Cleanliness
and frugality in Remedios took the form of unendurable tyranny. She
scolded her husband if he brought the slightest speck of dust into the
house on his shoes. She would turn the place upside down, flay all the
servants alive, if ever a few drops of oil were spilled from a jar, or a
crumb of bread were wasted on the table.

"A jewel for the home! And didn't I tell you so?" her father would
whisper, satisfied with his daughter's obtrusive qualities.

Rafael, for his part, found them intolerable. He had tried to love his
bride in the early months of their marriage. He made an honest effort to
forget, and recall the playful, passionate impulses he had felt on those
days when he had chased her around the orchards. But after a first fever
of passion had passed, she had proved to be a cold, calculating
child-bearer, hostile to expansiveness of love out of religious
scruples, viewing it her duty to bring new offsprings into the world to
perpetuate the House of Brull and to fill "grandaddy" don Matias with
pride at sight of a nursery full of future "personages" destined to the
heights of p