Every week he escaped to the capital in order to make long visits to the notary's widow.
"He doesn't come on my account," said the good senora, "who would bother about an old woman like me ?...

I tell you that he is in love with Cinta, and it will be good luck for the child to marry a man so wise, so serious...." As he listened to his mother's matrimonial schemes, Ulysses began to wonder which of a professor of rhetoric's bones a sailor might break without incurring too much responsibility.
One day Cinta was looking all over the house for a dark, worn-out thimble that she had been using for many years.

Suddenly she ceased her search, blushed and dropped her eyes.

Her glance had met an evasive look on her cousin's face.

He had it.