La Mellá was always in high spirits, singing and laughing at all hours of the day and night. She carried in her apron-pocket a tiny powder-puff with a mirror on the inside of the cover; she would stop at every other step to gaze at herself by the light of a street-lantern and powder her face.
She was affectionate and kind-hearted. Her excessive ugliness made Manuel gag. The lass was eager to win him but Vidal advised his cousin not to take up with her; La Goya suited him better, for she made more money.
La Mellá was not at all to Manuel's taste, despite her affectionate caresses; but La Goya was compromised with El Soldadito, a man with a position, as she said, for when he went to work he turned the crank of an handorgan.
This organ-grinder took all the receipts of La Goya, who, as the prettiest of the quartet, enjoyed the most numerous patronage; El Soldadito watched her and when she went off with anybody, followed, waiting for her to come out of the house of assignation so that he could collect her earnings.
Vidal, of the four, condescended to choose La Rabanitos and Engracia as the objects of his protection; the two girls were forever disputing over him. La Rabanitos looked like a pocket-edition of a woman; a white little face with blue streaks about her nose and her mouth; a rachetic, wizened body; thin lips and large eyes of schlerotic blue; she dressed like an old woman, with her sombre little cloak and her black dress; such was La Rabanitos. She was bothered with frequent hemorrhages; she spoke with all the mannerisms of a granny, making queer twists and turns, and she spent all her spare change on dry salt tunny fish, caramels and other dainties.
Engracia, Vidal's other favourite, was the typical brothel inmate: her face was white with rice powder; her dark, flashing eyes had an expression of purely animal melancholy; as she spoke she showed her blue teeth, which contrasted with the whiteness of her powdered countenance. She leaped from joy to dejection without transition. She could not smile. Her face was as soon darkened by stupidity as it was illuminated by a ribald merriment, insulting and cynical.
Engracia had little to say and when she spoke it was to utter something particularly bestial and filthy, of involved cynicism and pornography. Her imagination was of monstrous fertility.
A macabrous sculptor might have hit upon a work of genius by cutting the thoughts of this girl into the stone representing some infernal Dance of Death.
Engracia could not read. She wore loud waists, blue and pink; a white kerchief on her head and a coloured apron; she trotted along with a swaying movement, so that the coins in her purse kept jingling. She had been eight years in this brothel life, and was only sixteen in all. She was sorry to have grown up, for she said that she had earned far more as a little girl.
The friendship of Manuel and Vidal with these girls lasted a couple of months; Manuel could not make up his mind to take up with La Mella; she was too repulsive; Vidal widened the horizons of his activity, tippled with a gang of chulos and devoted himself to the conquest of a flower-girl who sold carnations.