Julia, however. . . . Her intelligence was as quick as it was fragile, her enthusiasm as indefatigable as it was voluble. At first she had attended classes, hoping that the teacher would say something that would provide a solution to her inner conflicts, illuminate the confusions she struggled with or confer meaning upon her acts. She quickly grew disenchanted and absences began to accumulate next to her name in the class lists.

Despite her mother’s scolding, Julia took up with a group of young people slightly older than her whose main preoccupation was politics. For long hours they discussed theoretical and tactical matters with an avid and boisterous passion that squeezed every subject dry and then tossed it aside like a useless piece of rind.

Julia listened, attentive, without any notion of the time that was passing and without caring about her obligations. She became familiar with many terms—social justice, equal distribution of wealth, penetration of foreign capital, agrarian reform—without having any clear understanding of their meaning. She was one of those women for whom the world, her own destiny and even her personality do not reveal themselves or take on a definite shape except through amorous contact with a man.

The brief and fruitless adventures in which Julia hazarded her adolescence lost all importance when she met Fernando Ulloa.

What had first attracted her? His manly attitude, his prestige as the leader of the group? Or the sharp clarity with which she could see herself reflected in another person’s consciousness, the lucid response to all of her perplexities?

Julia’s mother was opposed to a love affair that could easily have been transient, but her opposition only succeeded in precipitating events. One night Julia packed her bags and ensconced herself in Fernando’s room because she “couldn’t take it anymore.”

Fernando, in a burst of romanticism, decided to stand his ground against all objections to the situation. Among the young people in the group (all of them from good families), the pair of lovers enjoyed an ascendancy no one dared dispute for the daring way they had taken control of their own lives.

Julia’s mother swallowed her pride and pleaded with her to legalize her position by getting married. Julia refused. A married woman, a respectable bourgeois lady. . . . where would that leave her aura of the convention-defying heroine? Moreover, she was beginning to notice signs of bitterness in Fernando, unavowed, unconscious, which she did not want to aggravate.

After a few chaotic and carefree weeks, Fernando realized that they had nothing left to pawn and no other means of borrowing money. It was time to face up to his responsibilities. He gave up his student ways and found a job in Tepic.