"I have no wife. I am a bachelor."
"Then to your mother," Doña Cristina had the goodness to interpret.
"I have no mother, either; nor father, nor brothers or sisters. I am alone in the world."
Doña Amparo, so far as I could understand, showed herself surprised and displeased at my lone condition, and invited me to change it without loss of time. She also added that a man like me was destined to make any woman happy. I do not know what qualities of a husband the lady could have observed in me, except facility in grasping and sliding down a cable. I responded that surely I desired nothing else; but up to now no occasion had presented itself. My life as a mariner, to-day in one place, to-morrow in another, the shyness of men like me who do not frequent society, and even the fact that I had not met a woman who really interested me—all this had impeded its realization.
While saying this I fixed my gaze upon the smiling eyes of Doña Cristina.
A sweet and fanciful thought thereupon came into my head.
"Let us change the subject, mamma. Everyone follows his own pleasure, and if the Captain has not married it must be, of course, because he has not cared to."
"Exactly," said I, smiling, and gazing at her fixedly, "I have not cared to marry up to the present, but I cannot say that I may not care to some day when least looked for."
"Meanwhile we wish that you may be happy; that you may get a very handsome wife and a half-dozen plump children—lively and mischievous."
"Amen," I exclaimed.