features a certain hard and proud expression which excited a feeling
of antipathy. As some persons, although ugly, attract; Dona Perfecta
repelled. Her glance, even when accompanied by amiable words, placed
between herself and those who were strangers to her the impassable
distance of a mistrustful respect; but for those of her house--that
is to say, for her relations, admirers, and allies--she possessed a
singular attraction. She was a mistress in governing, and no one could
equal her in the art of adapting her language to the person whom she was
addressing.

Her bilious temperament and an excessive association with devout persons
and things, which excited her imagination without object or result, had
aged her prematurely, and although she was still young she did not seem
so. It might be said of her that with her habits and manner of life she
had wrought a sort of rind, a stony, insensible covering within which
she shut herself, like the snail within his portable house. Dona
Perfecta rarely came out of her shell.

Her irreproachable habits, and that outward amiability which we have
observed in her from the moment of her appearance in our story, were the
causes of the great prestige which she enjoyed in Orbajosa. She kept
up relations, besides, with some excellent ladies in Madrid, and it was
through their means that she obtained the dismissal of her nephew. At
the moment which we have now arrived in our story, we find her seated at
her desk, which is the sole confidant of her plans and the depository of
her numerical accounts with the peasants, and of her moral accounts
with God and with society. There she wrote the letters which her brother
received every three months; there she composed the notes that incited
the judge and the notary to embroil Pepe Rey in lawsuits; there she
prepared the plot through which the latter lost the confidence of the