As he watched him depart Leon’s soul sunk within him, and for some time he felt quite incapable of fixing his mind on anything.
The man whom we have seen in the retirement of his study, disturbed at intervals during many months by such scenes as we have described, did not, however, give up his whole time to scientific work. He, like others, was a wheel in the social machine, attached to it by his instincts, by his marriage, nay by science itself; and he was by no means one of those cobweb-spinning savants of whom we are told in romances that they are inseparable from their books and their alembics, and as ignorant of the outer world as they are of the true mysteries of science. Leon Roch went into the world, he dressed well, and indeed was not to be distinguished from the well-clothed multitude which constitutes the most important, though not the most picturesque portion of society. He never excused himself from the methodically dull routine of the life of the wealthy classes in the Spanish capital and he might be seen with his wife in the fashionable employment of “taking a drive”--a pleasure which consists in going at a fixed hour to a particular avenue and gently jolting to and fro in single file, one carriage behind another and close together, at a regular pace, so that the ladies who lounge in the landaus feel the hot breath of the horses just behind them, while the quadrupeds, mistaking the flowers in their bonnets for real ones, try to make a mouthful of them. He frequented the theatres, on the delightful system by which the subscribers share a seat and go in turns, and which has the advantage of providing them indiscriminately with emotion or amusement, quite irrespective of their frame of mind at the time. He invited a select number of friends to dinner on one day in the week, having asserted and won his right to choose his guests from among the best of the few distinguished men of whom Spain can boast. Nor did he select them by any rule of creed or opinion, but solely to suit his personal sympathies; as a consequence his weekly entertainments and his evening parties gathered together superior men; independent thinkers, staunch Catholics, politicians of the epicurean pattern, aristocrats of the most ancient coinage and nobles all hot and shining from the press, with men who had risen to social importance by their talents as omniscient gossips, or by the genuine charm of their conversation; there too were rising stars from the university--young men distinguished as professors, or who shone in the debating societies. Perfect harmony reigned however, for nothing is so soothing to the temper as a good dinner, the presence of elegant women, and the necessity for observing the laws of good breeding.