It was during one of these periods of mystical agitation that for the first time he had come into intimate relations with a woman. When he thought of it now it seemed like a dream, neither good nor evil, but only strange.
Every holiday he went to visit the women with whom he had lived during his boyhood, and they welcomed him as though he were already a priest, with familiar friendliness and cheerfulness, but always with a certain dignity. When he looked at Marielena he used to blush, and then scorned himself for blushing, because though he still liked her, he now saw her in all her crude realism, fat, soft and shapeless; nevertheless her presence and her gentle eyes still roused little tremors in him.
Marielena and her sisters used often to invite him to dinner on feast days. On one occasion, Palm Sunday, he happened to arrive early, and whilst his hostesses were busy laying the table and awaiting their other guests, Paul went out into their little garden and began to walk up and down the path which ran beside the outer wall, beneath the aspens
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