Just as in English books, the young girl, her aspirations and her innocent love affairs before marriage, figure largely in these novels. It is not necessary for her to wait until she is married in order to become a suitable heroine for fiction. Religious revolt or dissent, again, is one of the features most often used. There is still a very close union of Church and State in Spain, and life has a very ecclesiastical coloring. Nearly every family has ties of relationship or intimacy with some ecclesiastical person of either sex. This brings it about that such figures are as frequent in books as, correspondingly, in real life. In Valera's 'Pepita Ximenez' we find an earnest young student, a candidate for the priesthood, son of a noble house, turned aside from his holy career--through his father's connivance--by the fascinations of a most charming woman, their neighbor. In Valdes's 'Sister San Sulpicio' it is a young novice, a delightfully gay and bright creature, whom love and matrimony withdraw from her convent. In the same author's 'Marta y Maria' a fair young girl is seen endeavoring to conform in the midst of modern life to the ascetic ideals of the mediaeval saints, even to the point of wearing hair-cloth and beating her tender shoulders with a scourge. Galdos's 'Dona Perfecta' and 'The Family of Leon Roch' combat the undue influence of the confessor, or religious adviser, in the family, and 'Gloria' combats the immemorial bitter prejudice against the Jews. As may be seen, many of these subjects, if approached in a flippant way, might easily lend themselves to grossness and scandal; but such is not the Spanish spirit. The tone towards the Church is severely critical, but not destructive. It is the true secular tone of this century, which holds that a conventional attention to the things of the next world is only due when all demands for benevolence towards living men are satisfied. Howells points out that Galdos attacks only the same intolerant eccelesiastical spirit that elsewhere would be known by another name. These critics would "reform the party from within"; and as they handle with so much skill and consideration the sensibilities of their countrymen who still adhere to the fold, their efforts are the more likely to have a potent effect. It seems a curious anomaly that Pereda, the one of them who is the most modern and stirring in the intellectual way, professes himself the champion of monarchy in its most absolute form.