Read Online Thing to Love by Geoffrey Household - Free Book Online

nothing at all but laissez-faire, seemed to have faith, so far as he was capable of any, in Avellana.
    Oddest of all was that he had the university — pretty well all of its eager youth and a good half of its responsible professors, among them Beltrán Carrillo, the economist. Carrillo ought to have sympathized with Vidal; yet it was he who insisted that Vidal was heading straight for Communism by creating wealth in which the mass of the people had little share. He wanted to check the fast creeping inflation of the currency, tax heavily and honestly, and spend to the last cent on education and agriculture.
    The Avellanistas might be right; but for sheer practical ability Vidal probably beat the lot of them, though they considered him almost a traitor — not to Guayanas, but to its way of living. Vidal, of course, dismissed Avellana and his ideas with the single, scornful remark that he wanted to put the clock back. It was not wholly true. He wanted to stop the clock for a bit and put in a new movement.
    Juan de Fonsagrada slipped into the chair alongside his son-in-law.
    â€œEnjoying it?” he asked.
    â€œYes. It’s still another thing to love.”
    â€œYou should have seen it thirty years ago. Nothing had changed since the seventeenth century. Where’s Felicia?”
    Miro pointed to the single-storied buildings of the estancia and beyond them the village of the peons, a checkerboard of white walls and red-tiled roofs covering twenty acres with squares and oblongs.
    â€œOver there, with Doña Pilar.”
    â€œGod, that woman!”
    â€œShe seems harmless,” said Miro lazily.
    â€œMy generation of women were all like that. Whatever the husband does is right and marvelous. When he’s caught with his girl it’s: ‘Oh, my dear, but you know what men are like!’ When he skips to the United States with a sizable cut of the gold reserve, it’s ‘Well, my dear, you know he had to think of the children!’ And if he’s rude to the Church, he’s so intellectual and will be very different when he’s sixty. I find it a bore, Miro.”
    â€œFortunately you had the bringing up of Feli.”
    â€œFeli is a very spirited thoroughbred, my son, but do not underrate her heredity. For her you are always right.”
    â€œAs a father-in-law who couldn’t be more familiar with us both —” Miro began.
    â€œOh, I didn’t mean slight differences about cooking and souped-up carburetors. I meant that deep down you are always right. And she’s worse than the others. They, after all, accept their men with resignation. Feli glories in you. She is quite unaware of it, but she would kill for you. When you have a mistress —”
    â€œI have no immediate —”
    â€œI know it isn’t immediate. But when, as I was saying, you take a mistress she will decide that you love the girl, that so noble a character as yours could hardly do anything else. And she’ll make such a nuisance of herself with her twentieth-century ideas of personal liberty that you’ll be thoroughly glad when she returns to the sixteenth and poisons your little friend without any qualms at all.”
    â€œJuan, your imagination —”
    â€œThe thought of Pilar led me astray, Miro. She encourages her husband in his infidelities by remaining obstinately unaware of them. But let us give her her due. As a President’s lady that opulent bosom — black lace, I think, don’t you? — will be extremely imposing. She will ensure for Gil the neutrality of an otherwise disapproving Church. And the Ateneo will invent for her sayings of inspired stupidity, which she well might have uttered but in point of fact did not.”
    The profiled figure of Doña Pilar appeared in the archway of the main courtyard. Even at that distance and in the beginning of dusk her proportions, immensely maternal rather than matronly, had a certain nobility as