"Then leave the room at once; get out of my sight!" stormed the father.
Venturita rose from her seat and, stiff and sullen, she made her way through the party, and left the room, slamming the door heavily behind her. Don Rosendo, after standing a moment motionless with his eyes on the door by which his daughter had made her exit, turned round and said:
"I am sorry to have to be so severe with my children, but sometimes there is no help for it."
The fierce expression soon faded from Belinchon's fine face, and was superseded by his habitual look of thoughtful abstraction.
"Gonzalo, if it is not troubling you, I wish you would come with me into my study," he said, turning to his future son-in-law.
The young man, who had several times started and turned pale during the last scene, was now filled with dismay, for he feared that the summons betokened nothing less than that Don Rosendo, having a suspicion of the inconstancy of his feelings, was now about to call him to account. So, with his head bent and very anxious, he followed Belinchon into the study, which was a spacious apartment, furnished with the luxury befitting a rich merchant—a massive table and cabinets of mahogany, loaded with parcels of books and papers, a velvet carpet, sofas upholstered with brocade, and a colossal silver inkstand. A quarter of the room was filled with a heap of little packets, wrapped in paper of various colors, which would puzzle anybody who entered it for the first time. Not so Gonzalo, or any intimate friend of the house. Those packages were full of toothpicks!
"How so?" the reader will ask.
Don Rosendo Belinchon, a cod merchant of such renown, a dealer in toothpicks as well?
No, Don Rosendo did not deal in toothpicks; he made them. And this not from any speculative motive, which would have been beneath him, but from a purely disinterested love of the thing. He had evinced the taste in early youth, but the assiduous occupations of his trade and the vicissitudes of his life had only hitherto permitted him to indulge his passion in a desultory way in leisure hours. But from the time he could leave his office to a few faithful underlings he gave himself up heart and soul to such a simple and useful amusement. In the morning at Graell's shop, in the afternoon at the saloon, in the evening at home, or at Don Pedro Miranda's, he was always working. His servant spent a great part of the day in preparing perfectly equal pieces of dry wood, from which his dexterous hand produced the queen of toothpicks.
And as he never rested from his work, not even on holidays, the production was so excessive that there were not enough purchasers in town, and when the heap reached from the table to the ceiling he was obliged to despatch packets of them to his friends in the capital. Thanks to the noble efforts of this clever representative of his trade, we can say with pride that Sarrio attained the level of the great capitals in this interesting branch of civilization, and that no other Spanish or foreign town could compete with it, for the house of every rich man, as well as every poor one, boasted a well-cut toothpick, irrefutable testimony of the cultured refinement of its inhabitants.