The satisfaction with which Don Timoteo moved his ordinary feet across the antique carpets! The voluptuous complacency with which he stroked the plush of the furniture, the velvet of the curtains, the silk of the tapestries with the hot palm of his hand! Who would ever have thought it. . . . He, Don Timoteo, the owner of a set of china inscribed with an anagram and sheets embroidered with initials. All right, the initials weren’t his. But the sheets belonged to him; he was the one who used them. What a pity he never had visitors he could dazzle with his opulence!

To top off his problems, Don Timoteo’s wife, Doña Serafina, who had fought tooth and nail to get ahead during the family’s impoverished years, had acquired, now that she had sufficient leisure to enjoy life’s pleasures, a tendency to grieve over the salvation of her soul. She became very devout and spent the whole day nosing out places where a mass was going to be celebrated or a ceremony performed. She found a confessor in whom to confide her cares, and Padre Damián displayed admirable skill in depicting the horror of the sin her husband had committed by raising himself up with the inheritance of the Cancino sisters. He harped so insistently and so energetically on this subject that the poor lady was crucified on the horns of a terrible dilemma: restore the fortune to its rightful heirs or be forever damned. As the decision to restore it was not hers to make (and her pleas did no more than exacerbate her husband’s hatred of the church), Doña Serafina had no way out but to become a thief herself. She robbed on a small scale, of course, in order to give alms to the clergy and put out even just one of the flames of hellfire that were going to torment her family throughout eternity.