“A bright idea, truly! A wife costs so little in these days. And afterward? ‘For him who does not like soup, a double portion.’ I am going to lose my situation, it may be, and you talk to me of marrying!”
“I do not propose, to you a wife who will lighten your purse, but one who will make it heavy.”
And the leader laughed loud and long at his own wit. Miranda remained pensive, thinking over the solid advantages of the plan, which he was not long in discovering. There could be no better means of providing against the assaults of hostile fortune and securing the doubtful future, before the few hairs he had left should have disappeared and the superficial polish conferred by fashion and the arts of the toilet should have vanished. And then, Leon was a city that suggested of itself matrimonial ideas. What was there to do but marry in a place where dullness reigned supreme, where celibacy inspired mistrust, and where the most innocent adventure gave rise to the most outrageous slanders? Therefore he said aloud:
“You are right, my boy. Leon is a place that inspires one with the desire to marry and to live like a saint.”
“The truth is, that for you,” continued Colmenar, “marriage has now become a necessity. Aside from the fact that it is high time for you (here he smiled maliciously) to think of marrying, unless you want to be called an old bachelor, your health and your pocket both require it. If I cannot succeed in keeping you in your place what are you going to do? I suppose you have saved nothing?”
“Saved? I? Au jour le jour,” said Miranda, pronouncing with airy nonchalance the transpyrenean phrase.
“Well, then, il faut se faire une raison,” replied Colmenar, pleased to be able to display his learning in his turn.
“The question is to find the woman, the phoenix,” murmured Miranda, meditatively. “Girls of a marriageable age there are in plenty, but I have lost my reckoning here. Suggest some one you——”
“Some one here? God deliver you from the women of Madrid. They are more to be feared than the cholera? Do you know what the requirements are of any one of those angels? Do you know how much they spend?”
“So that——”