The time was now ripe.
Not that he greatly loved his cousin. The family to which the unhappy
youth belonged was of no credit or use to himself, and this particular
member was worse than useless, being afflicted with an unpardonable
vice--lack of judgment. His stupidity had already got him into a number
of minor scrapes. As a child he annoyed foreigners by ingenuous
requests for money, stole flowers from neighbours' gardens because they
were so irresistibly pretty, tied saucepans to their cats because they
had such irresistibly long tails and made such irresistibly droll
movements and noises in order to get rid of them, frightened old ladies
by making faces at them; sometimes, by way of a change, he threw off a
fit; later on, he had taken to smashing crockery, mooning about the
vineyards, forgetting errands entrusted to him, throwing stones at
passing carriages and making a general nuisance of himself. The PARROCO
knew that he had been dismissed as incompetent by tradespeople to whom
he was apprenticed, by farmers who had employed him as a labourer.
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