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Manuel seemed to feel that it vexed Roberto to see him so deeply taken up with the bohemian life, and in order to enter into his friend’s good graces, one morning he accompanied Roberto as far as the house where he gave his English lesson. On the way he told him that he had made a number of unsuccessful efforts to find work, and asked what course to pursue further.

“What? I’ve already told you more than once what you have to do,” answered Roberto. “Look, look and keep on looking. Then work your very head off.”

“But suppose I can’t find a place.”

“There’s always a job if you really mean business. But you have to mean it. The first thing you’ve got to learn is to wish with all your might. You may answer that all you want is to vegetate in any old way; but you won’t succeed even in that if you keep hanging around with the loafers who come to this studio. You’ll sink from a mere idler to a shameless tramp.”

“But how about them?...”

“I don’t know whether or not they’ve ever done anything wrong; as you will readily understand, that doesn’t concern me one way or the other. But when a man can’t get a real grasp upon anything, when he lacks will power, heart, lofty sentiments, all ideas of justice and equity, then he’s capable of anything. If these fellows had any exceptional talent, they might be of some use and make a career for themselves. But they haven’t. On the other hand, they’ve lost the moral notions of the bourgeois, the pillars that sustain the life of the ordinary man. They live as men who possess the ailments and the vices of genius, but neither the genius’s talent nor soul; they vegetate in an atmosphere of petty intrigues, of base trivialities. They are incapable of carrying anything to completion. There may be a touch of genius in those monsters of Alex’s, in Santillana’s poetry; I don’t say there isn’t. But that’s not enough. A man must carry out what he’s thought up, what he’s felt, and that takes hard, constant, daily toil. It’s just like an infant at birth, and although that comparison is hackneyed, it is exact; the mother bears it in pain, then feeds it from her own breast and tends it until it grows up sound and strong. These fellows want to create a beautiful work of art at a single stroke and all they do is talk and talk.”