“The women, at their husbands’ insistence, will open their doors to her. They won’t regret it. Julia knows how to repay hospitality: she introduces the lax ways of other towns. Ah, how they envy her, these women who are always shut up in their houses, how they would like to behave with her shamelessness. And we, the shepherds, are letting the wolf into the sheepfold to decimate the ewes when our duty is to chase it off with clubs.”

“To the parable you cite I can oppose another: that of the wheat and the tares. Do you know how far the roots of the evil extend? Do you know if in your attempt to root it out you will not also destroy what you want to protect? For many years I have led my congregation without upheavals, to the satisfaction of all and with the blessings of my superiors.”

This final phrase brought the skirmish to an end and reestablished the principle of authority. Manuel bowed his head, mumbling an apology.

“I have never at any moment sought to criticize your attitude, Monseñor. Only. . . .”

In any case, the zeal Manuel so imprudently exhibited was not sincere. What did that foreign woman matter to him? But he had waited for his conversation with Don Alfonso so anxiously that wasting it in idle gossip was irritating him to the point of making him forget the courtesy he owed his bishop. Bitterly he asked himself for the thousandth time a question that had always been the thorn in his side: What good is it to have drive, to feel you are capable of any and everything, when you are poor, when you are no one? Just Manuel Mandujano, the orphan, brother of his only sister, Benita, who, because of the difference in their ages and other circumstances, was more like a mother to him.

So many sacrifices, she said with a sigh (but also with a sense of pride), so many sacrifices for the boy’s education. Because from the moment he discovered how to decipher the words in his primer, everyone, teachers and schoolmates alike, was amazed by the accuracy of Manuel’s memory and the quickness of his mind. He learned to read, write and solve elementary math problems more rapidly than the other students. That should have been enough for him, as it was enough and more than enough for others. But it was a pity to waste such a talent in an ordinary civil post.

What to do? Benita, a member of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart and other religious societies, listened to her confessor’s advice and took great pains from then on to inculcate a vocation for the priesthood in her brother.