In the handling the cashier came out bankrupt, but could never make up her mind to tell Julio that to meet necessities she was forced to take in sewing, at night, while others slept and her loneliness was emphasized. The little Julio kept her company, studying his lessons or reading aloud one of those continued stories, which delight women and children by the complexity of their plot and by the happy exit, which ever favors virtue. Sometimes, the romantic history contrasted with her own, so mean and prosaic, and a tear or two, unnoticed by the reader absorbed in the story, fell upon the white stuff of the sewing and expanded in it as in a proper handkerchief. But if Julito learned of the tears, he stopped his reading and kneeling before his mother dried them, more by the loving words with which he overwhelmed her, than with his coarse schoolboy’s kerchief.
“Come, foolish mama; why are you crying? Don’t you know it isn’t true? The whole book is made up.”
He never added that he knew well that she was not weeping for the characters of the story, but for the neglect of her husband; but, as her husband was also his father, he employed this pretext in order not to condemn Julio, openly and aloud, to Carmen. Thus, there happened, what was to be expected, that between Carmen and Julito there grew up love in one of its sublimest forms, the love of mother and son, with open caresses, but caresses the most pure, with no touch of sin; and ideal love which illumines our spirit and assures us that we would have loved our mother so, had we not lost her too early.
Julito’s fifteen years spent in tenements and public schools, had acquired for him an undesirable stock of had habits, of which perhaps the least was smoking, inveterate, demanding his withdrawal at the end of each chapter, to the corridor to smoke a cigarette in the open air. One night Carmen, who knew not how to show him the extreme affection, which by his treatment of her he had gained, said, unexpectedly: “If you wish to