Rita, tamed under the heavy hand of Dolores, was softened by the peaceful influences of a commonplace and happy home. The ordered life, the decencies of a civilized household of pretty surroundings—for Mrs. Malagon piqued herself on being cultivated and artistic—seemed to make round her a sort of tender half-light in which the child moved happy, joyous, herself the brightest spot in the haziness of a mediocre daylight, where life appeared a quiet and an easy achievement. Adéle Malagon—only a year younger than Rita—had for her companion that kind of fierce friendship of which only very young girls seem capable. They were very much together, almost continuously, being at first educated together by Miss Malagon's governess. Only now and then Dolores's capricious fiat—when José had to be punished for some want of pliability—would call the girl back into the atmosphere of scolding and garlic of her aunt's home; where, for a few days, or even a couple of weeks, she lived—painfully on the alert; combative and unrestful; prepared for strife, like a warrior in the presence of an enemy. Then her uncle was childishly happy and ludicrously miserable. He admired her bravery in holding out—with more or less success—against Dolores, he enjoyed her caressing ways—that were for him only—and he deplored the state of affairs that hardened the character of the girl. In the other household Adéle moped, the governess—good soul—complained dolefully, "That child will forget everything! When she gets back from that awful house she is positively wicked for a time. I can't manage her". Mrs. Malagon staring hard with those unseeing, swimming eyes of hers would murmur serenely, "Oh! It will be all right". At the family luncheon the corpulent Henry would miss the girl and remark in his profound murmur, "Ho! The little savage gone again!" And when she returned he greeted her with "Ho! You have come back? Bueno!" Then he complained with ponderous playfulness about his Adéle learning "that barbarous jargon of those Biscayans from our wild mountaineer" and distributed impartially wholesome bonbons to both children. After dinner, before going to his café, he would sit in his wife's salon wheezing comfortably and beam in amused silence upon his wife, his Adéle and that waif of the mountains as if all three were his promising daughters. In the café José kept his seat, would jump up to meet him, would shake both his hands at parting. He liked the unassuming old fellow whose opinions were so very sound. Very sound! From time to time—very seldom—old Ortega, freshly shaved, scrupulously got up in black:—as if he were going to a funeral—would call on Mrs. Malagon and, after anxious inquiries if there were no visitors, would be introduced by a pert bonne into the splendour of Mrs. Malagon's knicknacks. Rita's benefactress—as he called her—received him always with sweet patience which he did not abuse. His calls were short. To him she appeared a princess, a queen, nay, more, almost supernatural: a benevolent fairy that had saved Rita from vague but immense misfortunes. He stammered, always embarrassed, his heart full, "You are an Angel. An old man thanks you—with his heart, all his heart!" When Mrs. Malagon said that it really was a small matter, she was pleased to do anything for Rita—who was charming; "We all love her", José would exclaim in a trembling voice: "Isn't she! Who wouldn't love her? But Heaven has sent you for my comfort. I kiss your hands and feet". And he always did kiss the little woman's hands devoutly before going out of that magnificent drawing room. Mrs. Malagon—when the door had closed after the simple old fellow—would hold up close to her short-sighted eyes the plump white hand and look for a time with a faint smile at a tear José often left there, before she would dry it with quick, gentle taps of her cambric handkerchief, while she thought, "Am I really so very good? How extremely touching!"

The peaceful conventions of middle life, the conventions resembling virtues, made for Rita as if a shelter behind a respectable curtain that separated her from the real existence of passions. The pretty assumptions of selfish quietude gave to events an aspect of general benevolence, a polished surface of easy curves hiding the resounding emptiness of thoughts, the deadly fear of sincerity, the cherished unreality of emotions. It went on as a tale made up of charming but meaningless sentences, flowing with gentle ease through a succession of serene days. In the shallow stream Rita was carried away from year to year; listened to the soothing imbecility of its babble. Listening, she was willing to forget the impressions of young days, the rugged landscapes, the rugged men, the strong beliefs, the strong passions. To her all this was hardly a matter of experience. It was more like the memory of an atmosphere, the memory of some subtle quality of air made up of freshness of perfumes, of brilliance, of stimulating gusts, of gentle breezes—things intangible, indescribable, not understood; impossible to define and impossible to forget. She thought of them with love, with longing—sometimes with repulsion, often with scorn—now and then with rare lucidity that suggested fear, that swift fear of the unavoidable approaching in dreams. She would shake it off with the smile of unbelief—with the callous innocence that ignores the trammels of its origin. She was so adaptive that her adaptiveness had the aspect of a cruel absence of the heart. She appeared gracious and heartless living in aimless periods of sunshine, living between sunrises and sunsets as if there had been, suspended over her head, no menace of another day.

Only from time to time during her repeated visits to Passy she caught a glimpse of sincere emotions. José's increasing love for herself, the love inarticulate and profound; that unchecked flow of tender impulse relieving the ignorant and oppressed heart was the first thing that struck her as unquestionable and imposing in its absolute openness, in its convincing unreserve. Its helplessness was touching and it seemed to her to be an indissoluble part of it, filling her with regret at the thought that so much affection must be bound up together with so much weakness. Was it always so? Was it always the most sincere that were the weakest? For her uncle as she grew up, she had a caressing, a deep gratitude—in which, almost unknown to her, lurked a faint flavour of disenchanted pity. The vagaries of Dolores she met with a rigidity of demeanor which caused that worthy woman to foam at the mouth in the imperfect privacy of a big glass cage where she sat from morning to night with her yellow profile of a bilious parrot hovering over the pages of account books. The angry miserliness of Dolores grew with age, rising by its vastness, its stupidity, by the blind ruthlessness of its strength to the dignity of an elemental force of nature. And the increasing griminess of the home where the plaster peeled in slabs between the grey sashes of dusty windows, the leprous aspect of its façade, remarkable even in the unhealthy blotchiness of the soiled street, hid the cold emptiness of big rooms: four stories of vast and dirty desolation through which, shaking his head dolefully, José shuffled with slippered feet in futile rounds of mournful and useless inspection.