"It is a story of a young man in Spain," said Don Raymundo, "a boy who had a mama and a sister and a name, all of them associated with a rambling stone house that perched on a sunburnt hill. He also had a somewhat lively and energetic brain, and a very moderate education. All he lacked was an income. I hope I do not bore you more than usual?"
Hazlitt moved restlessly, and Don Raymundo continued: "Observe the sequence. The wealth of dreams is traditionally Oriental, and the Philippines lie in the Orient. So the boy, lying there beneath the broken roof of the gaunt stone house, and being sadly in need of an income, dreams of a journey over sunny seas to a region where Spaniards dwell in palaces and gain untold gold, living like little gods together on broad acres where cane rustles and coffee-blossoms gleam and the hemp sends up its never-dying stalk. Demonio!" said Don Raymundo, with a mocking lightness bitter as it well could be, "I seem to be falling into the mood of that boy who dreamed."
Don Raymundo's silence seemed expectant, somehow, and Hazlitt asked: "He came?"
"He came," said Don Raymundo, "and he awoke. They say that he found the rustling cane and the gleaming blossoms a bit monotonous, even while they turned to gold beneath his touch. His environment, I take it, must have been rather like—" He motioned toward the window and the world that lay outside it, the fields stretching away in the burning light to the dim edge of the forest, the endless sweep of the jungle, the distant glow of the sleeping sea, all the untamable world that pressed around the "Hacienda without a Name."
"Like this," Hazlitt assented reluctantly.
"Like this," Don Raymundo agreed. "People say he said at last that proper companionship, and perhaps a wife—Diós mio, I grow stupid. His nearest neighbor, who was half a native, was—blessed, I believe the proper word is—blessed with a daughter. A most charming young woman in those days, they tell me, very gay, very gentle, very affectionate, most accomplished; she had spent many years on the Continent, I believe. In short, she was an unusually beautiful and attractive young person, very like—"
"Like—" Hazlitt began unwillingly, and stopped.
"Like Dolores," Don Raymundo assented for him. "And this interesting young woman naturally felt ill at ease among her homestaying half-countrymen, and naturally had much in common—but all that is easily understood. They were married. And that," Don Raymundo said with languid brutality, "seems to have been the ending of the young man's second dream. Since then he has lived with open eyes."
Hazlitt felt a twinge of shame come over him at listening. After all, the law which establishes a neutral strip of silence between men is based on something deeper than mere convention.
"Don't you think," Hazlitt asked at last—he had to say something—"that this young man took himself too seriously, too tragically? If he had given more to life, had gone about among people—"