A party of young fellows belonging to the Cabin conceived the happy idea of dressing up Don Jaime Morin as a bib-and-tucker young lady. When dressed up like this they told him that he would be better disguised with paint than with a mask, and he concurred with the suggestion. A young fellow then took up a box of paints and a brush, and pretending to dip it into several colors, he passed the brush several times over his face, but it had only been dipped in water.
Morin asked to see himself in a looking-glass, but the mischievous youths took good care not to give it to him. They all cried out: "But how capital you are, Don Jaime! How grotesquely you are painted! Your own mother would not know you!" Upon the strength of these words the good Morin allowed himself to be carried off to the Lyceum, where his young friends advised him to joke certain young ladies, to which he replied that his jokes would prove a shock to their nerves. And in effect, no sooner was he in the salon than he cried out to a young lady, in a falsetto voice:
"Hollo, Rosarita! what have you done with Anselmo? We know that you throw him a letter out of the window every night at ten o'clock."
"But, Don Jaime!" exclaimed the girl, looking at him in surprise, "how did you find that get up?"
"The devil! She knew me," said the good Morin, withdrawing. He then turned to another of the fair sex, with the same result. "It is strange," he said at last, "they all know me at once. It must be the voice, because although I am painted with a vengeance--"
He was full of these reflections when a bony hand seized him from behind.
"Great ass! booby! idiot! Who got you up like that?"
It was his beloved spouse, the ingenious, severe, Doña Brigida.
"Get along, stupid! You're always the laughing-stock of every place!" and she pushed the poor fellow out of the salon. The good lady, who was dressed in a domino and mask, went with him as far as the anteroom, where she left him, and returned to the ballroom to carry out her own devices, as we shall see.
Surrounded by a group of dominoes stood the kind Don Feliciano Gomez, whose shining, bald, pyramidical head overtopped the circle of ladies around him as they cracked their insufferable jokes, which sometimes bordered on insults.