Meanwhile Pepe was alighting from his nag, and Dona Perfecta, her face
bathed in tears and barely able to utter a few trembling words, the
sincere expression of her affection, was receiving him at the gate
itself in her loving arms.

"Pepe--but how tall you are! And with a beard. Why, it seems only
yesterday that I held you in my lap. And now you are a man, a grown-up
man. Well, well! How the years pass! This is my daughter Rosario."

As she said this they reached the parlor on the ground floor, which
was generally used as a reception-room, and Dona Perfecta presented her
daughter to Pepe.

Rosario was a girl of delicate and fragile appearance, that revealed
a tendency to pensive melancholy. In her delicate and pure countenance
there was something of the soft, pearly pallor which most novelists
attribute to their heroines, and without which sentimental varnish it
appears that no Enriquieta or Julia can be interesting. But what chiefly
distinguished Rosario was that her face expressed so much sweetness and
modesty that the absence of the perfections it lacked was not observed.
This is not to say that she was plain; but, on the other hand, it is
true that it would be an exaggeration to call her beautiful in the
strictest meaning of the word. The real beauty of Dona Perfecta's
daughter consisted in a species of transparency, different from that
of pearl, alabaster, marble, or any of the other substances used in
descriptions of the human countenance; a species of transparency through
which the inmost depths of her soul were clearly visible; depths not
cavernous and gloomy, like those of the sea, but like those of a clear
and placid river. But the material was wanting there for a complete