He took with him the little Lucía, now the only treasure dear to his heart, who with her infantile graces had already begun to enliven the shop, carrying on a fierce and constant warfare against the figs of Fraga and the almonds of Alcoy, less white than the little teeth that bit them.
The young girl grew up like a vigorous sapling planted in fertile soil; it almost seemed as if the life she had been the cause of her mother’s losing was concentrated in the person of the child. She passed through the crises of infancy and girlhood without any of those nameless sufferings that blanch the cheeks and quench the light in the eyes of the young. There was a perfect equilibrium in her rich organism between the nerves and the blood, and the result was a temperament such as is now seldom to be met with in our degenerate society.
Mind and body in Lucía kept pace with each other in their development, like two traveling companions who, arm in arm, ascend the hills and help each other over the rugged places on their journey, and it was a curious fact that, while the materialist physician, Velez de Rada, who attended Señor Joaquin, took delight in watching Lucía and noting how exuberantly the vital current flowed through the members of this young Cybele, the learned Jesuit, Father Urtazu, was also her devoted admirer, finding her conscience as clear and diaphanous as the crystals of his microscope, neither of them being conscious that what they both admired in the young girl was, perhaps, one and the same thing seen from a different point of view, namely, perfect health.
Señor Joaquin desired to give Lucía a good education, as he understood it, and indeed did all in his power to cripple the superior nature of his daughter, though without success. Impelled on the one hand by the desire to bestow accomplishments on Lucía which should enhance her merit, fearing on the other lest it should be sarcastically said in the village that Uncle Joaquin aspired to have a young lady daughter, he brought her up in a hybrid manner, placing her as a day pupil in a boarding school, under the rule of a prudish directress who professed to know everything. There Lucía was taught a smattering of French and a little music; as for any solid instruction, it was not even thought of; knowledge of social usages, zero; and for all feminine knowledge--a knowledge much vaster and more complicated than the uninitiated imagine--some sort of fancy work, as tedious and useless as it was ugly, patterns of slippers in the worst possible taste, embroidered shirt-bosoms, or bead purses. Happily, Father Urtazu sowed among so many weeds a few grains of wheat, and the moral and religious instruction of Lucía, although limited, was as correct and solid as her school studies were futile. Father Urtazu had more of the practical moralist than of the ascetic, and the young girl learned more from him concerning ethics than dogma. So that although a good Christian she was not a fervent one. The absolute tranquillity of her temperament forbade her ever being carried away by enthusiasm; there was in the girl something of the repose of the Olympian goddesses; neither earthly nor heavenly matters disturbed the calm serenity of her mind. Father Urtazu used to say, pushing out his lip with his accustomed gesture: