of them is quite a monster; though those who are badly mixed do such
monstrous things.

Pepe Rey, who is such a good fellow--so kind, and brave, and upright,
and generous, so fine a mind, and so high a soul--is tactless and
imprudent; he even condescends to the thought of intrigue; and though
he rejects his plots at last, his nature has once harbored deceit. Don
Inocencio, the priest, whose control of Dona Perfecta's conscience has
vitiated the very springs of goodness in her, is by no means bad, aside
from his purposes. He loves his sister and her son tenderly, and wishes
to provide for them by the marriage which Pepe's presence threatens to
prevent. The nephew, though selfish and little, has moments of almost
being a good fellow; the sister, though she is really such a lamb of
meekness, becomes a cat, and scratches Don Inocencio dreadfully when he
weakens in his design against Pepe.

Rosario, one of the sweetest and purest images of girlhood that I know
in fiction, abandons herself with equal passion to the love she feels
for her cousin Pepe, and to the love she feels for her mother, Dona
Perfecta. She is ready to fly with him, and yet she betrays him to her
mother's pitiless hate.

But it is Dona Perfecta herself who is the transcendent figure, the
most powerful creation of the book. In her, bigotry and its fellow-vice,
hypocrisy, have done their perfect work, until she comes near to being
a devil, and really does some devil's deeds. Yet even she is not without
some extenuating traits. Her bigotry springs from her conscience, and
she is truly devoted to her daughter's eternal welfare; she is of such
a native frankness that at a certain point she tears aside her mask of
dissimulation and lets Pepe see all the ugliness of her perverted soul.