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A wife, on the decease of her husband, neglects washing, and is supposed to sit lamenting by herself for not less than fifteen days. Long before this, however, her female friends come to her house and beg her to desist from weeping, bringing with them the powder of a plant called "larra." With this the widow washes her head, and then resumes her former life and occupations.
His negation had no reference, far from it, to women, to love, or to friends, things where the pedantic and ostentatious scepticism of literary men of the Larra type usually finds its fodder; his nihilism was much more the confusion and discomposure of one that explores a region well or badly, and finds no landmarks there, no paths, and returns with a belief that even the compass is not exact in what it shows.
This rash act is doubtless the locura to which Larra refers. As a virtuous wife she first dismisses the young man, and when in her weakness she recalls him she is forced to treat him with indifference and coldness, since she knows that her husband is overhearing their conversation.
Each plant has its lover, drawn to it by a kind of elective affinity and invariable tendency. The Larra makes for the thistle, the Vanessa for the nettle, the Clytus for the ilex, and the Crioceris for the lily. "The weevil knows nothing but its peas and beans, the golden Rhynchites only the sloe, and the Balaninus only the nut or acorn."
In vain came her cousin Larra, the next morning, to ask her to go in quest of crabs and sea-urchins with the other children. Ida went off alone on another quest. The old woman sat in the cave with the morning sun glancing upon her silver hair, and upon a most beautiful picture, to which she had just turned. Now, Ida was an affectionate child.
When the Tauchnitz editions have been exhausted, and when the stranger has mastered Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Espronceda, Larra, and Rivas, there is always that book which Dr. Johnson loved, the street, or that lighter literature which Moore sings, "woman's looks," to fall back upon.
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