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“Very well, sir. As you please.”

Alex had credit at the bakery and the grocer’s, and calculated that Manuel’s board would cost him less than a model would ask for services. The two decided to feed upon bread and preserves.

The sculptor was by no means a lazy fellow but he lacked persistence in his work and was not master of his art; he was never able to bring his figures to completion, and noting, as he attacked the details of the modelling, that the defects stood out more prominently than ever, he would leave them unfinished. Then his pride induced in him the belief that the exact modelling of an arm or a leg was an unworthy, decadent labor; in which his friends, who were afflicted with the same impotency of artistic effort, agreed with him.

Manuel troubled himself little with questions of art, but often it occurred to him that the sculptor’s theories, rather than sincere convictions, were screens behind which to conceal his deficiency.

Alejo would make a portrait or a bust, and they would say to him: “It doesn’t look like the subject.” Whereupon he would reply: “That’s a distinctly minor matter.” And in everything he did it was the same.