“You have a way of breaking the spell just at the critical moment. I am never sure whether the you I am sometimes in love with is really there or only assumed, like one of your rarely worn gowns. There are times when I think you have every possibility, and others when I believe you to be merely a more subtle variety of the American flirt.”
“Well, I’m sorry you didn’t propose,” she said, sedately. “Now I suppose you never will. You would have been quite a feather in my cap.”
“That means you would not have accepted me?”
“There have been times when I did.” He was now goaded into boldness.
“Well, you’re just a conceited Englishman!” she cried, furiously. “If I thought you meant that I’d never speak to you again!”
“Now I know where I am,” he said, serenely. “This, after all, is the only you I am at home with.”
“Well, don’t speak to me again for twenty-four hours. I can’t stand you. Thank Heaven, there is the train!”
Some hours later he found her sitting at the drawing-room window of the hotel looking down upon the most characteristic sight in Madrid—the afternoon procession of carriages.
From four o’clock until any hour of a fine night, while the national stew simmers on the back of the stove, the wealth and fashion, and those that would be or seem to be both, drive out the Calle de Alcala to the great paseos and parks, and back through the narrow Carrera San Jeronimo in an unbroken line that bewilders the eye and creates the delusion of an endless and automatic chain. There are more private carriages in Madrid than in any city in the world, and in bright weather their owners would appear to live in them, indifferent to hunger or fatigue. Those who have Paris gowns exhibit them, those who have not hide their poverty under the always picturesque mantilla; but few are so poor as not to own a turnout. A woman of any degree of fashion in Madrid will sell her house if necessary, her furniture, her jewels, and live in two rooms with one or no servant, but have her carriage and her daily drive she will; for to lose one’s place in that distinguished chain would be to lose one’s hold on the world itself. So long as they can see and be seen daily in the avenues they love, bow to the same familiar faces, and criticise the gowns of friend and foe, the _olla podrida_ can burn and the frock under the mantilla be darned and turned, the daughters dowerless, and even theatre tickets unavailable. They have, at least, the best in life; and then there is always the long morning in bed and the bull-fight. And who would not envy a people so tenacious of the desirable and so bravely satisfied?