He gave serious thought to his life-problems.
"I'm not made for this," he told himself. "I'm neither a savage like
Bizco nor a brazen, carefree lout like Vidal. What am I going to do,
then?"
A thousand things occurred to him, for the most part impossible of
attainment; he imagined all manner of involved projects. Within him,
vaguely, his maternal inheritance, with its respect for all
established custom, struggled against his anti-social, vagrant
instincts that were fed by his mode of living.
"Vidal and Bizco," he said to himself, "are luckier chaps than myself.
They don't hesitate; they have no scruples. They've got a start on
their careers...."
In the end, he considered, they would come to the gallows or to the
penitentiary; but in the meantime the one experienced no suffering
because he was too beastly to know what it meant, and the other
because he was too lazy, and both of them let themselves float
tranquilly with the stream.
Despite his scruples and his remorse, Manuel spent the summer under
the protection of El Bizco and Vidal, living in Casa Blanca with his
cousin and his cousin's mistress, a girl who sold newspapers and
practised thievery at the same time.
The Society of the Three carried on its operations in the suburbs and
Las Ventas, La Prosperidad and the Dona Carlota section, the Vallecas
bridge and the Four Roads; and if the existence of this society never
came to be suspected and never figured in the annals of crime, it is
because its misdemeanours were limited to modest burglaries of the
sort facilitated by the carelessness of property owners.
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