The pettiness of provincial life wounded Julia deeply. It wasn’t just the poverty and the lack of intellectual stimulus and suitable friends: the adventure had lost its novelistic quality and become routine, and the criteria of the people here were very different from those of the group of students at the Instituto Polytécnico. In Tepic, society frowned on the lovers, mocked them, left an empty space around them.

This reaction, which Julia hadn’t expected, disconcerted her. Gradually she began to grow colder and her impulsiveness diminished as she yielded to her adversaries’ perspective. She became petulant, was always on the lookout for grievances, and no explanation, no apology would appease her for very long.

What did she want? Fernando would ask in exasperation, to get married? to leave? Julia didn’t answer. How could she talk about the urgent, implacable need that had suddenly awoken within her to wield respectability, wealth and power? It was so sordid, and nevertheless for Julia it was the only thing that was true.

Fernando fell silent as well, offended by her tenacious silence, vaguely suspecting what was now expected of him and ill-disposed ever to concede it. Why sacrifice himself once more? This tension between the two of them, these occasional outbursts of anger and tears, this tacit reproachfulness were the only compensation for his past generosity.

Julia, who was becoming irritated at the certainty of having disappointed Fernando, understood she could no longer rely on him. To achieve her ambitions she had no other tool but her own shrewdness. In Tepic, she had lost the match; she had been marked, once and for all, by the unfavorable judgment of society. But she had gained experience. Somewhere else she could use her wits to reach a position in which she could not be humiliated, in which others would revere and even fear her. She dreamed of the day Fernando would be transferred.

She had to wait two years. But Julia didn’t waste the time. From the distance fixed by the disdain of those around her, she observed the habits and fashions of those she had exalted as models: the aristocrats of Tepic.

Julia polished her manners and applied herself conscientiously to the task of erasing the style her middle-class neighborhood had imprinted on her. She retained just the dose of insolence necessary to assess the defects and vices of those she was imitating, thus keeping herself from falling into an annihilating vertigo of admiration. In a final stroke of inspiration she used her father to invent a genealogy of noble Spanish ancestors whose accent she practiced when she was alone.

When the couple arrived in Ciudad Real, Julia could have a reasonable amount of confidence in her eventual triumph. Her look and her bearing were, she believed, those of a lady.