Burial often takes place without the offices of the Church, for there are few among the working classes who can afford to pay for a funeral Mass, and very many are unaware that they can insist upon the attendance of a priest even without a fee. And since the charge for a marriage in church amounts in many parishes to as much as 25 pesetas--the average weekly wage of the agricultural labourer certainly not exceeding half that sum--it is only to be expected that the civil ceremony, which costs one peseta, or the stolen “blessing” snatched from an unwilling priest by the pair proclaiming themselves man and wife at the close of any Mass, should be more frequently resorted to than the orthodox function. Many couples, moreover, live all their lives as husband and wife, as faithfully as if married by the Church or the mayor, without any religious or legal tie at all. “The women don’t like it,” said a working man to the writer, “but what is one to do? How can we pay twenty-five pesetas to get married? And the women are only now beginning to understand that the civil marriage is quite as good as the other, if there is any question of money to be left to the children. I could show you plenty among my neighbours who live as if married, and no one takes notice that they are not. The priests only say such couples are living in sin because they have not got the marriage fee out of them.” “It is true that my daughter-in-law could leave my son if she liked,” said an old woman when discussing a quarrel between her hot-tempered son and his hotter-tempered “wife.” “There was no money for the marriage, so I consented to their marrying without going to church. They will never separate: it does not occur to them that it would be possible. It is not as if they were not faithful to each other. My son does not look at other women, and as for my daughter-in-law (_mi nuera_), he would kill her if she set her eyes on another man, and well she knows it. There is no sin in marriages like that, whatever the priests may say about it. Of course I would have preferred that they should be married in church, and so would my daughter-in-law, but what are you to do when there is no money?” The use of the term _nuera_ here is significant. No social stigma attaches to these “wives” who are no wives at all, unless they leave one man to go to another. Then they are branded as “women of bad repute” by their neighbours, and shunned accordingly.