! Taciturn and fond of her own company, Roseta
would lie out full length on the wet sand, playing with shells or making
piles of seaweed. She would sit for hours with her blue eyes staring
into space with fixed hypnotic vacancy, the breeze twirling her yellow
locks, as twisted and withy as so many snakes, or blowing up the faded
old frock that reached the knees of two slim legs, shiny white, which
had known no stockings other than the coat of brown the sun burned over
their extremities in summer. Or for hours also she would lie face
downward on the sand, which would take on the imprint of her body under
her, bathing her face in the thin ripple of water that the surf threw up
and sucked back again over the shining beach spangled with all the
capricious tracings of moire.

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!
Couldn't wipe a plate or wash a glass in the cafe without breaking up
housekeeping! Put a herring on to fry when she was tending the fire and
she'd burn it black! Much better to let her run the beach or go to the
dressmaker's shop in the Cabanal.

At times the child showed a mad eagerness to study, and at the risk of a
whipping, would run away from home and go to the village school. But
when Tona found this out and was inclined to encourage her, she would
play truant all the time. It was only in summer that she was of any use
at all. Then a fondness for money could be reconciled with her passion
for roving aimlessly here and there; so during the bathing season, she
would take a jar almost as big as herself, fill it with water from the
_font de Gas_, and go glass in hand among the bathers, or even among the
carriages driving on the pier, shaking her tangled yellow head of hair
and crying in rather a faint voice: _Al ua fresqueta!_ Other times it
would be a basket, instead, filled with cakes, seasoned some with salt
and some with sugar, which she hawked plaintively about: _Salaes y
dolses!_ In this way Roseta would bring as many as two _reals_ to her
mother in the evening, and Tona's face would brighten up, for with
business going as it was, she was getting selfish.

That was the story of Roseta's inf