Manuel was inspired with the earnest resolution to change his mode of living; he felt capable now of embracing an energetic determination and carrying it through to the end.
His elder sister, who had just married a fireman, had presented him with a pair of torn trousers that her husband had discarded, an old jacket and a frayed muffler. To these she had added a cap of most absurd shape and colour, a battered derby and a few vague bits of good advice concerning industriousness, which, as everyone knows, is the father of all virtues, just as the horse is the noblest of animals and idleness the mother of all vice.
It is quite possible—almost certain—that Manuel would have preferred to these kindly, vague counsels, this cap of absurd shape and colour, this old jacket, this frayed muffler and the pair of outworn trousers, a tiny sum of money, whether in small change, silver or bills.
Such is youth; it has neither goal nor compass; ever improvident, it imputes greater value to material gifts than to spiritual, unable in its utter ignorance to realize that a coin is spent, a bill is changed, and both may be lost, while a piece of good advice may neither be spent nor changed, nor reduced to small change, possessing furthermore the advantage that without the slightest expenditure or care it lasts forever, without mildewing or deteriorating. Whatever his preferences may have been, Manuel had to be satisfied with what he got.
With this ballast of good advice and bad clothing, unable to detect a gleam of light on his way, Manuel ran over mentally the short list of his acquaintances, and it occurred to him that of them all, Roberto Hasting was the only one likely to help him.
Penetrated with this truth, which to him was of supreme importance, he went off in quest of his friend. At the barracks they had not seen him for some time; Doña Casiana, the proprietress of the boarding-house, whom Manuel came upon in the street one day, knew nothing of Roberto’s whereabouts, and suggested that perhaps the Superman would be able to tell.
“Does he still live at your place?”
“No. I got tired of his never paying his bills. I don’t know where he lives; but you can always find him at the office of El Mundo, a newspaper over on the Calle de Valverde. There’s a sign on the balcony.”
Manuel set out for a newspaper office on the Calle de Valverde and found it at once. He walked up the steps to the main floor and paused before a door with a large glass pane, on which were depicted two worlds,—the old and the new. There was neither bell nor knocker, so Manuel began to drum with his fingers upon the glass pane, directly upon the area of the new world, and was surprised in this selfsame occupation by the Superman, who had just come from the street.
“What are you doing here?” asked the journalist, eyeing him from top to toe. “Who are you?”