“Nothing.”
“Nothing, indeed! Unbutton your jacket.”
Cæsar turned very pale and did not unbutton it; but the master, seizing him by a lapel, unbuttoned his jacket and his waistcoat, and found that the student was covered with papers.
“What are these papers? For what purpose are you keeping them here?”
“He does it,” one of his fellow students replied, laughing, “because he is afraid of catching cold and becoming consumptive.” They all made comments on the boy’s eccentricity, and a few days later, to show that he was not a coward, he tried to go out on the balcony on a cold winter night, with his chest bare.
Among his fellow-students Cæsar had an intimate friend, Ignacio Alzugaray, to whom he confided and explained his prejudices and doubts. Alzugaray was not a boarder, but a day-scholar.
Ignacio brought anti-clerical periodicals to school, which Cæsar read with enthusiasm. His sojourn in a religious college was producing a frantic hatred for priests in young Moncada.
Cæsar was remarkable for the rapidity of his decisions and the lack of vacillation in his opinions. He felt no timidity about either affirming or denying.
His convictions were absolute; when he believed in the exact truth of a thing, he did not vacillate, he did not go back and discuss it; but if his belief faltered, then he changed his opinion radically and went ahead stating the contrary of his previous statements, without recollecting his abandoned ideas.
His other fellow-students did not care about discussions with a lad who appeared to have a monopoly of the truth.