While thus transforming her husband, she did not forget herself. She discarded the silk skirt and jacket of piña for European costume, loaded her head with false hair, and her person with such extravagances generally as to disturb the peace of a whole idle and tranquil neighborhood.
The glamour around the husband first began to dim when he tried to approach the subject of the rice powder by remarking that nothing is so ugly as the false or so admirable as the natural. Doña Victorina looked unpleasantly at his teeth, and he was silent. Indeed, at the end of a very short time the doctora had arrived at the complete subjugation of her husband, who no longer offered any more resistance than a little lap-dog. If he did anything to annoy her, she forbade his going out, and in her moments of greatest rage she tore out his false teeth, and left him, sometimes for days, horribly disfigured.
When they were well settled in Manila, Rodoreda received orders to engrave on a plate of black marble:
"Dr. De Espadaña, Specialist in All Kinds of Diseases."
"Do you wish me to be put in prison?" asked Don Tiburcio in terror.
"I wish people to call you doctor and me doctora," said Doña Victorina, "but it must be understood that you treat only very rare cases."
The señora signed her own name, Victorina de los Reyes de de Espadaña. Neither the engraver of her visiting cards nor her husband could make her renounce that second "de."
"If I use only one 'de,' people will think you haven't any, imbecile!" she said to Don Tiburcio.
Then the number of gewgaws grew, the layer of rice powder was thickened, the ribbons and laces were piled higher, and Doña Victorina regarded with more and more disdain her poor compatriots who had not had the fortune to marry husbands of so high estate as her own.
All this sublimity, however, did not prevent her being each day older and more ridiculous. Every time Captain Tiago was with her, and remembered that she had once really inspired him with love, he sent a peso to the church for a mass of thanksgiving. But he had much respect for Don Tiburcio, because of his title of specialist, and listened attentively to the rare sentences the doctor's impediment of speech let him pronounce. For this reason and because the doctor did not lavish his visits on people at large he had chosen him to treat Maria.