A reflection of the novel's theme that some guiding dream-ideal is necessary to go on living.

What passion is Don Jose possessed of? The next sentence decoys us into one answer, his passionate patriotic desires. But coming straight from the previous sentence, it sounds like the "passion" he possesses, which keeps him from bankruptcy, is Antonia's devotion. This alternate reading reinforces the sense of nationalism being kept upright and, as it were, solvent by idealism.