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Absorbed in these reflections, he was passing along Alcala Street when he heard his name called several times. It was La Mella and La Rabanitos, skulking in a doorway. "What do you want?" he asked. "Nothing, man. Just a word with you. Have you come into your money yet?" "No. What are you doing?" "Hiding here," answered La Mella. "Why, what's the trouble?"
"We hunt at night and sleep by day." La Mella, La Goya, La Rabanitos and Engracia would go at night to the centre of Madrid, accompanied by a white-bearded beggar with a smiling face and a striped cap. The old man came to beg alms; he was a neighbour of the girls and they called him Uncle Tarrillo, bantering him upon his frequent sprees.
La Rabanitos looked like a pocket-edition of a woman; a white little face with blue streaks about her nose and her mouth; a rachetic, wizened body; thin lips and large eyes of schlerotic blue; she dressed like an old woman, with her sombre little cloak and her black dress; such was La Rabanitos.
La Rabanitos would say. "Why, she's already as disreputable as us...." One night Vidal did not put in his usual appearance at Casa Blanca, and two or three days later he showed up at the Puerta del Sol with a tall, buxom woman garbed in grey. "Who's that?" asked Manuel of his cousin. "Her name's Violeta; I've taken up with her." "And the other one, at Casa Blanca?" Vidal shrugged his shoulders.
The friendship of Manuel and Vidal with these girls lasted a couple of months; Manuel could not make up his mind to take up with La Mella; she was too repulsive; Vidal widened the horizons of his activity, tippled with a gang of chulos and devoted himself to the conquest of a flower-girl who sold carnations. Engracia and La Rabanitos conceived a violent hatred for the lass. "That strumpet?"
Vidal came to be the cadet for four girls who lived together in Cuatro Caminos and were named, respectively, La Mella, La Goya, La Rabanitos and Engracia; they had come to form, together with Vidal, El Bizco and Manuel another Society, though this one was anonymous.
Vidal, of the four, condescended to choose La Rabanitos and Engracia as the objects of his protection; the two girls were forever disputing over him.
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