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She was an incorrigible truant, a chip of the old block, as Tona put it, thinking of that loafer who had been responsible for her, and who also sat staring day in day out at the horizon like a good-for-nothing idiot, half awake. If Tona had had to depend on that girl for a living, a fine mess she would have been in! Lazy, irresponsible, was no name for it!
His apprenticeship started auspiciously. Up to that time Pascualet had gotten along on the old clothes his father had left. But siñá Tona wanted him to begin his new trade with real dignity; so she closed the tavern, one afternoon, and went off to a ship chandler's bazaar at the Grao. The boy remembered the excitement of that visit to the stores for years and years.
A curse on the Rector's head! That cuckold was to blame for everything! He was the one responsible for the fleet's going out. It would serve him right if he never got in! And Dolores and siñá Tona caught such angry words, and lowered their heads in shame under public condemnation.
These slight favors gradually brought Martinez into the family, making his relations with siñá Tona more and more intimate. He got his meals now at the tavern, and spent most of his time there; and the mistress finally had the pleasure of darning his stockings and sewing the buttons on his underwear. Poor siñor Martines! What would happen to a fine young man like him without a woman around?
Siñá Tona usually confided her troubles to a certain Martinez, a young policeman who patrolled that part of the shore, spending the noon hours under the café shelter, his rifle across his knees, his eyes vaguely fixed on the horizon of the sea, and his ears filled with the running plaint of the tavernkeeper.
But it wasn't so much that, in itself, as the influence Dolores was coming to have with the boys, and thus spoiling a plan that Tona had had for a long time, of marrying Tonet to the daughter of an old friend of hers.
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