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Forces that made things look beautiful were certainly part of a “Merciful Dispensation.” Memory was one of these forces. How exquisite, probably, life at Plasencia would look some day!

It would take a lot of mellowing, she thought, with a little smile. Again it was a question of the swarm of tiny details: beauty, evidently, requiring their elimination.

But, for instance, the interplay of emotions at tea that afternoon—was it woven from the tiny brittle threads of unimportant details, or was it made of a more resisting stuff?

Why was the Doña equally irritated that she, Teresa, ignored young men, and that Concha ran after them—like a tabby-cat in perpetual season? No—that was disgusting, coarse, unkind. There was nothing ugly about Concha’s abundant youth: she was merely normal—following the laws of life, no more disgusting than a ripe apple ready to drop.

There came into Teresa’s head the beginning of one of Cervantes’s Novelas Exemplares, which tells of the impulse that drives young men, although they may love their parents dearly, to break away from their home and wander across the world, “... nor can meagre fare and poor lodging cause them to miss the abundance of their father’s house; nor does travelling on foot weary them, nor cold torment them, nor heat exhaust them.”