We are all good people, though we have never seen as much of the world as can be seen from a skylight, and live here as though wrapped in cotton wool, but you Lunas have always been the best among the best, to say nothing of us Villalpandos, who come close behind.

Ay! if your mother could raise her head! If your father were alive! But I lay all the blame on your brother, as being weak and a simpleton, having that cursed blindness of all fathers, who ignore the danger in the hope of marrying their daughters well." "Well, but how was it, aunt?
What passed between my niece and the cadet ?" "What happens frequently in the world, but what has never happened here before.

A thousand times I said to my brother, 'See, Esteban, this young gentleman is not for your daughter'-- very sympathetic, very lively, and wearing the uniform of the Academy like no one else, leader of a group of the wildest cadets in all their escapades about the town, besides a son of a great family--wealthy people who did not allow him to come to Toledo with his purse empty.

And she--the poor Sagrario, crazy with love, flattered by her cadet, as proud as possible when she walked on Sundays through the Zocodover and the Miradero between her mother and that handsome young lover, that all the girls in the place envied her.

The beauty of your niece was the talk of all Toledo; the girls in the college for noble ladies, nicknamed her the 'sacristana' of the Cathedral; but the poor girl lived only for her cadet, and she seemed to devour him with her beautiful blue eyes.