behavior.

She had lost her mother about two years before; her sister had married a
farmer, and lived out toward Las Vistillas. She herself lived with her
father, who was a Vizcaino,[31] who had been established in Madrid for
many years in a little house with two rooms facing the corral where the
cows were kept.

She was a genuine Madrilena to the extent of never having even set foot
on a railway train, or having in her walks gone farther than
Carabanchel.

The Vizcaino, since the death of his wife, who had exercised a
restraining influence upon him, had been taking more and more
desperately to drinking habits, and treated his daughter very brutally.
But even in her mother's lifetime she had become so accustomed to cruel
treatment that it had never once occurred to her that she was living a
very unhappy life; and when one day Enrique spoke of it in that way,
after one of those barbarous deeds which the dairyman frequently
committed, she looked at him in surprise and said, 'yes, that he was
right, that she was very miserable'; but her tone seemed to say, "Man
alive! don't you know that it isn't my fault?"

As day after day went by, Enrique, constantly visiting at the "dairy,"
enduring the _freshnesses_, the pushing, and occasionally even the slaps
of this gentlest of _chulas_, when he went beyond the bounds of reason,
spent his time very pleasantly in the toils of his love.

At first he had a few unpleasant encounters with the brute of a father;
but afterwards they became great friends as soon as the dairyman
discovered that the senorito knew a thing or two about bulls, that he
had himself taken part in bull-fights, and was a great friend of the
most famous _espadas_, to whom the plebeians of Madrid offer fervid
worship.

When he came into the shop drunk, Enrique would take his hat and go, and
the other was not in the least offended at him for it; in this way he
avoided any collision with him. He spent not less than two hours every
afternoon talking with Manolita; in the evening, after the shop was
closed, he escorted her to the cafes to collect for the milk that they
had used during the day; he would wait for her at the door while she
settled her accounts with the proprietor.

As the _chula_ had her suitors, and they belonged to the "common
people," and were jealous of a senorito paying attentions to her, our
lieutenant was sometimes threatened, and even attacked; but we know that
in his character of _bulldog_,