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X
SAN ANTONIO
F course we again took lodgings with Beppa.
She was now more than sixty years old, but as
buxom and voluminous as when I left her roof seven
years before, after more than eighteen months of so-
journ under it. She was just as poor as then; in fact,
she was much poorer. She had lost her exuberant good
spirits. She no longer had any hopes of her husband’s
pension. He was a captain in the army. She was
crushed; and to a certain extent it is my fault.
The fact was that she had regarded my stay with
her as an omen of great prosperity to come, and when
I left she gave up her responsible position as an inter-
mediator between the nobility of Granada and the pub-
lic pawnshop, and established a boarding-house with
thirteen rooms and electric light. Most of her
boarders were students, and Spanish students have the
unfortunate habit of discontinuing their stay in a
boarding house once they have been given notice to
pay up. The business ended with her giving up the
whole thing after a four months’ experiment. She
could say at least that she had had nothing to lose.
But she had lost something; for she never thought
of returning to her former occupation as an inter-
mediator. Instead she tried to starve her way along,
and it was in this condition that we found her.
She lived in a narrow street, in a nice little two-story
tenement which served as the bottom of the street,
205
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