h he had
finished for a society!... While the boy with his forehead wrinkled in
his eagerness, tried to imitate his master's work, he listened to the
good advice that the master gave him without looking up from the canvas
over which his angelic brush was running.

Painting must be religious; the first pictures in the world had been
inspired by religion; outside of it, life offered nothing but base
materialism, loathsome sins. Painting must be ideal, beautiful. It must
always represent pretty subjects, reproduce things as they ought to be,
not as they really are, and above all, look up to heaven, since there is
true life, not on this earth, a valley of tears. Mariano must modify his
instincts--that was his master's advice--must lose his fondness for
drawing coarse subjects--people as he saw them, animals in all their
material brutality, landscapes in the same form as his eyes gazed upon.

He must have idealism. Many painters were almost saints; only thus could
they reflect celestial beauty in the faces of their madonnas. And poor
Mariano strove to be ideal, to catch a little of that beatific serenity
which surrounded his master.

Little by little he came to understand the methods which Don Rafael
employed to create these masterpieces which called forth cries of
admiration from his circle of canons and the rich ladies that gave him
commissions for pictures. When he intended to begin one of his
_Purisimas_, which were slowly invading the churches and convents of the
province, he arose early and returned to his studio after mass and
communion. In this way he felt an inner strength, a calm enthusiasm,
and, if he felt depressed in the midst of the work, he once more had
recourse to this inspiring medicine.

The artist, besides, must be pure. He had taken a vow of chastity after
he had reached the age of fifty, somewhat late to be sure, but it was
not because he had not known before this certain means of reaching the
perfect idealism of a celestial painter. His wife, who had grown old in
her countless confinements, exhausted by the tiresome fidelity and
virtue of the master, was no longer anything but the companion who gave
the responses when he prayed his rosaries and Trisagia at night. He had
several daughters, who weighed on his conscience like the reproachful
memory of a disgraceful materialism, but some were already nuns and the
others were on the way, while the idealism of the artist increased as
these evidences of h