o
look like other men, he must preserve the exterior that stamped him as
an artist, so that people might not pass by the great Renovales without
recognizing him. But he managed, while keeping within this desire, to
approach and mingle with the fashionably dressed young men who
frequented the countess's house.

Other people too noticed this change. Students in the School of Fine
Arts pointed him out from the gallery of the Opera-house or stopped on
the sidewalk when they saw him at night, with a shining silk hat on his
carefully trimmed hair and the expanse of shirt-front showing in his
unbuttoned overcoat. The boys in their simple admiration imagined the
great master thundering before his easel, as savage, fierce and
intractable as Michael Angelo in his studio. And so when they saw him
looking so differently, their eyes followed him enviously. "What a good
time the master is having!" And they fancied the great ladies disputing
over him, believing in perfect faith that no woman could resist a man
who painted so well.

His enemies, established artists but who were inferior to him, growled
in their conversations. "Four-flusher, prig! He wasn't satisfied with
making so much money and now he's playing the sport among the
aristocracy, to pick up more portraits, to get all he can out of his
signature."

Cotoner, who sometimes stayed at the house in the evenings, to keep the
ladies company, smiled sadly as he saw him leave, shaking his head.
"It's bad. Mariano married too soon. Now that he is almost an old man,
he's doing what he didn't do in his youth in his fever for work and
glory." Many people were laughing at him already, divining his passion
for the Alberca woman, that love without practical results, that made
him live with her and Monteverde, acting as a good-natured mediator, a
tolerant kindly father. When the famous master took off his mask of
fierceness, he was a poor fellow about whom people talked with pity:
they compared him with Hercules, dressed as a woman and spinning at the
feet of his fair seducer.

He had contracted a close friendship with Monteverde as a result of
meeting him so often at the countess's. He no longer seemed foolish and
unattractive. Renovales found in him something of the woman he loved and
therefore his company was pleasing. He experienced that calm attraction,
free from jealousy, that the husband of a mistress inspires in some men.
They sat together at the theater, went to walk, conver