This Sounds A Little Romantic, And Perhaps It Is
Not True.
Some gentlemen take a great interest in the bull-feasts and
breed the bulls and cultivate the bull-fighters; what other esthetic
interests they have I do not know.
All classes are said to be of an
Oriental philosophy of life; they hold that the English striving and
running to and fro and seeing strange countries comes in the end to the
same thing as sitting still; and why should they bother? There is
something in that, but one may sit still too much; the Spanish ladies,
as I many times heard, do overdo it. Not only they do not walk abroad;
they do not walk at home; everything is carried to and from them; they
do not lift hand or foot. The consequence is that they have very small
hands and feet; Gautier, who seems to have grown tired when he reached
Seville, and has comparatively little to say of it, says that a child
may hold a Sevillian lady's foot in its hand; he does not say he saw it
done. What is true is that no child could begin to clasp with both hands
the waist of an average Sevillian lady. But here again the rule has its
exceptions and will probably have more. Not only is the English
queen-consort stimulating the Andalusian girls to play tennis by her
example when she comes to Seville, but it has somehow become the fashion
for ladies of all ages to leave their carriages in the Delicias and walk
up and down; we saw at least a dozen doing it.
Whatever flirting and intriguing goes on, the public sees nothing of it.
In the street there is no gleam of sheep's-eying or any manner of
indecorum. The women look sensible and good, and I should say the same
of the men; the stranger's experience must have been more unfortunate
than mine if he has had any unkindness from them. One heard that Spanish
women do not smoke, unless they are _cigarreras_ and work in the large
tobacco factory, where the "Carmen" tradition has given place to the
mother-of-a-family type, with her baby on the floor beside her. Even
these may prefer not to set the baby a bad example and have her grow up
and smoke like those English and American women. The strength of the
Church is, of course, in the women's faith, and its strength is
unquestionable, if not quite unquestioned. In Seville, as I have said,
there are two Spanish Protestant churches, and their worship, is not
molested. Society does not receive their members; but we heard that with
most Spanish people Protestantism is a puzzle rather than offense. They
know we are not Jews, but Christians; yet we are not Catholics; and
what, then, are we? With the Protestants, as with the Catholics, there
is always religious marriage. There is civil marriage for all, but
without the religious rite the pair are not well seen by either sect.
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