I shall make no such promise, answered my mother, for I mean to pass the remnant of my days in the Asturias, and in a state of perfect independence. Will you not on all occasions, replied I, be absolute mistress in my household? May be so, and may be not, rejoined she: you have only to fall in love with some flirt of a girl, and then you will marry: then she will be my daughter-in-law, and I shall be her step-mother; and then we shall live together as step-mothers and daughters-in-law usually do. Your prognostics, said I, are fetched from a great distance. I have not at present the most remote intention of entering into the happy state; but even though such a whim should take possession of my brain, I will pledge myself for instructing my wife betimes in an implicit submission to your will and pleasure. That is giving security without the means of making good your contract, replied my mother; you would scarcely be able to justify bail. I would not even swear that, in our sparring-matches, you might not take your wife's part in preference to mine, however ill she might behave, or however unreasonably she might argue. You talk very excellent sense, madam, cried my secretary, coming in for his share of the conversation; I think just as you do, that docility is about as much the virtue of a donkey as of a daughter-in-law. As the matter stands, that there may be no difference of opinion between my master and you, since you are absolutely determined to live asunder, you in the Asturias, and he in the kingdom of Valencia, he must allow you an annuity of a hundred pistoles, and send me hither every year for the payment. By thus arranging matters, mother and son will be very good friends, with an interval of two hundred leagues between them. The parties concerned fell in at once with the proposal: I paid the first year in advance, and stole out of Oviedo the next morning before dawn, for fear of vying with Saint Stephen in popular favor. Such were the charms of my return to my native place. An admirable lesson this, for those successful upstarts, who, having gone abroad to make their fortunes, come home to be the purse-proud tyrants of their birthplace. _CHAPTER III._ _GIL BLAS SETS OUT FOR VALENCIA, AND ARRIVES AT LIRIAS; DESCRIPTION OF HIS SEAT; THE PARTICULARS OF HIS RECEPTION, AND THE CHARACTERS OF THE INHABITANTS HE FOUND THERE._