had already said a dozen times, summarizing the two
ideas he had managed to produce in four hours of sonorous chatter. With
duration as the test of quality, no one on the government had yet
succeeded in equaling a certain redheaded deputy of the Opposition who
was forever heckling the Premier, and could talk, if need be, three days
in succession for four hours a day.

Rafael had heard people praise the conciseness and the clarity of
new-fangled oratory in the parliaments of Europe. The speeches of party
leaders in Paris or in London took up never more than half a column in a
newspaper. Even the old man he was answering had adopted, to be original
in everything, that selfsame conciseness: every sentence of his
contained two or three ideas. But the member from Alcira would not be
led astray by such niggardly parsimony. He believed that ponderousness
and extension were qualities indispensable to eloquence. He must fill a
whole issue of the Congressional Record, to impress his friends back
home in the District. So he talked and talked on, trying deliberately to
avoid ideas. Those he had he would keep in reserve as long as possible,
certain that the longer he held them prisoner the longer and more solemn
would his oration be.

He had gained a quarter of an hour without making any reply to the
previous speech whatever, and literally burying his illustrious
antagonist in flowers. _Su senoria_ was noteworthy firstly, because,
secondly, because, fourteenthly, because ... Nay more, he had
accomplished this, performed that, endeavored the other
thing--"But"--and with this _but_, alas, Rafael must begin to loosen up
on a little of what he had prepared in advance. _Su senoria_ was an
"ideologue" of immense talent, but ever removed from reality; he would
govern peoples in accordance with theories dug out of books, without
paying any attention to practical considerations, to the individual and
indestructible character possessed by every nation!...

And it was worth sitting an afternoon even in that Chamber to hear the
slighting tone of scorn with which the member from Alcira emphasized
that word _ideologue_ and that phrase about "theories dug out of books"
and "living removed from reality!"

"Good, fine. That's the way to give it to him," his comrades encouraged,
nodding their sleek bald-pates in indignation against anybody who tried
to live apart from reality. Those _ideologues_ needed somebody to tell
them what was what!

And