"Some concession must always be made to superior talent," observed Don
Inocencio.

"And this morning, when I was at the Cirujedas'--oh, you cannot imagine
in what a state they had my head! Was it true that you had come to
pull down the cathedral; that you were commissioned by the English
Protestants to go preaching heresy throughout Spain; that you spent the
whole night gambling in the Casino; that you were drunk in the streets?
'But, senoras,' I said to them, 'would you have me send my nephew to
the hotel?' Besides, they are wrong about the drunkenness, and as for
gambling--I have never yet heard that you gambled."

Pepe Rey found himself in that state of mind in which the calmest man is
seized by a sudden rage, by a blind and brutal impulse to strangle some
one, to strike some one in the face, to break some one's head, to crush
some one's bones. But Dona Perfecta was a woman and was, besides, his
aunt; and Don Inocencio was an old man and an ecclesiastic. In addition
to this, physical violence is in bad taste and unbecoming a person of
education and a Christian. There remained the resource of giving vent
to his suppressed wrath in dignified and polite language; but this last
resource seemed to him premature, and only to be employed at the moment
of his final departure from the house and from Orbajosa. Controlling his
fury, then, he waited.

Jacinto entered as they were finishing supper.

"Good-evening, Senor Don Jose," he said, pressing the young man's hand.
"You and your friends kept me from working this afternoon. I was not
able to write a line. And I had so much to do!"