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Her gray hair was partly concealed by a dark shawl to which time and grease had imparted a reddish tint. Beneath her skirt peeped forth feet shod in hempen sandals, with coarse white stockings. Jaime hastily arose. That old servant was the Popess! The chairs were arranged in a certain disorder, which suggested the coterie which gathered there every afternoon.
"For God and for the King!" Ortega was shot on the coast of Catalonia when his Carlist expedition failed, and the Popess remained in Majorca, ready to bestow her money upon new pious enterprises. Many thought that she was ruined after her prodigality during the last civil war, but Jaime knew what a fortune the devout lady possessed.
It was now being whispered about the city that, definitely renouncing the pomps of this world and perhaps even the pontifical Golden Rose, which never arrived, she was about to turn over all her property to the priests of her court, going to shut herself up in a convent, with all the advantages of a privileged lady. The Popess was going away forever; it was impossible to expect anything from her.
"But if I marry," he said, imitating Doña Juana's frigid manner, "will you come to my wedding?" This put an end to the tranquillity of the Popess, who drew herself up haughtily. The romantic books of her youth rushed through her mind; she spoke like an injured queen at the end of a chapter of a historic novel. "Caballero! I am a Genovart on my father's side.
The Popess recognized the sinfulness of these mythological decorations, but as they were reminiscent of a happy epoch, of a time when the caballeros ruled, she respected them, and tried not to see them. A damask curtain parted, and a woman who looked like an old servant entered the salon, dressed in black, wearing a plain skirt and a poor jacket, after the manner of a peasant woman.
"But let us not waste words; order, method, and clarity! Above all let us write practically. Lack of practical character is our ruination." Finally he came to the Popess Juana, that imposing señora, whom Pablo Valls had only seen at a distance, as he seemed to her the personification of all the revolutionary impieties and of all the sins of his race. "There is no hope for you in that direction."
"One loves the Pope, and one the Popess" is an uncomplimentary proverb given by Gogol. "To have priests' eyes," meaning to be covetous or extortionate, is another. The drunkenness in all classes strikes Russian statesmen with dismay, and the priests and the popes, are among the worst delinquents.
The Popess Juana, talking with Jaime one day, had tried to wound him by saying in her cold voice and with her haughty mien: "Your mother was noble; of a family of caballeros but she was not a butifarra like ourselves!" The early years of his life, when Jaime first began to take notice of the things about him, were passed without seeing his father save during hasty trips to Majorca.
The rupture between his father and Juana the Popess was, no doubt, the reason why she held herself aloof from this branch of the family and treated Jaime with hostile frigidity. His father had been an officer in the Navy, in accordance with family tradition.
The Popess Juana, despite the fact of their relationship, refused to recognize him. She was much occupied during that epoch. She made journeys to the Peninsula; it was said that she turned over enormous sums to the partisans of Don Carlos who were carrying on the war in Catalonia and the northern provinces. Let no one mention Jaime Febrer, the old time naval officer in her presence!
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