You can hitch up with her."
"But don't you live in this house?"
"No. We live in Embajadores lane. It's my aunt Salome 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 Principe 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, Senor Ignacio and his
children went off to their house. Manuel supped at Senora 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.
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