"No. We live in Embajadores lane. It's my aunt Salomé and my grandmother who live here. Over where we are—oh, boy!—the times I've had!"
"In the town where I come from," said Manuel, not to be dwarfed by his cousin, "there were mountains higher than twenty of your houses here."
"In Madrid we've got the Monte de Príncipe Pio."
"But it can't be as high as the one in that town."
"It can't? Why, in Madrid everything's the best."
Manuel was not a little put out by the superiority which his cousin tried to assume by speaking to him about women in the tone of an experienced man about town who knew them through and through. After the noonday nap and a game of mus, over which the shoemaker and a few neighbours managed to get into a wrangle, Señor Ignacio and his children went off to their house. Manuel supped at Señora Jacoba's, the vegetable huckstress's, and slept in a beautiful bed that looked to him far better than the one at the boarding-house.
Once in, he weighed the pros and contras of his new social position, and in the midst of his calculations as to whether the needle of the balance inclined to this side or that, he fell asleep.
At first, the monotony of the labour and the steady application bothered Manuel; but soon he grew accustomed to one thing and another, so that the days seemed shorter and the work less irksome.
The first Sunday Manuel was fast asleep in Señora Jacoba's house when Vidal came in and waked him. It was after eleven; the marketwoman, as usual, had departed at dawn for her stall, leaving the boy alone.
"What are you doing there?" asked Vidal. "Why don't you get up?"