The women of the _Marina_ ran away as terrified as those Greek princesses on the painted vases when surprised, washing their robes, by the apparition of a passionate triton.
Some nights at the hour when the lighthouses were beginning to pierce the coming dusk with their fresh shafts of light, he would become melancholy and, forgetting the difference in their age, would talk with his nephew as though he were a sailor companion.
He regretted never having married....

He might have had a son by this time.

He had known many women of all colors--white, red, yellow, and bronze--but only once had he really been in love, very far away on the other side of the planet, in the port of Valparaiso.
He could still see in imagination a certain graceful Chilean maiden, wrapped in her great black veil like the ladies of the Calderonian theater, showing only one of her dark and liquid eyes, pale and slender, speaking in a plaintive voice.
She enjoyed love-songs, always provided that they were sung "with great sadness"; and Ferragut would devour her with his eyes while she plucked the guitar, chanting the song of Malek-Adhel and other romances about "Roses, sighs and Moors of Granada," that from childhood the doctor had heard sung by the Berbers of his country.

The simple attempt at taking one of her hands always provoked her modest resistance....

"That, then...." She was ready to marry him; she wished to see Spain....