The Air Was Soft, And After Burgos, Warm; Something Southern, Unfelt
Before, Began To Qualify The Whole Scene, Which As
The evening fell grew
more dramatic, and made the promenade the theater of emotions permitted
such unrestricted play nowhere else
In Spain, so far as we were witness.
On one side the place was arcaded, and bordered with little shops, not
so obtrusively brilliant that the young people who walked up and down
before them were in a glare of publicity. A little way off the avenue
expanded into a fine oblong place, where some first martyrs of the
Inquisition were burned. But the promenadefs kept well short of this, as
they walked up and down, and talked, talked, talked in that
inexhaustible interest which youth takes in itself the world over. They
were in the standard proportion of two girls to one young man, or, if
here and there a girl had an undivided young man to herself, she went
before some older maiden or matron whom she left altogether out of the
conversation. They mostly wore the skirts and hats of Paris, and if the
scene of the fountain was Arabically oriental the promenade was almost
Americanly occidental. The promenaders were there by hundreds; they
filled the avenue from side to side, and
The delight of happy laughter
The delight of low replies
that rose from their progress, with the chirp and whisper of their feet
cheered the night as long as we watched and listened from the sun
balcony of our hotel.
II
There was no more heat in the radiators of the hotel there than at
Burgos, but for that evening at least there was none needed. It was the
principal hotel of Valladolid, and the unscrubbed and unswept staircase
by which we mounted into it was merely a phase of that genial pause, as
for second thought, in the march of progress which marks so much of the
modern advance in Spain, and was by no means an evidence of arrested
development. We had the choice of reaching our rooms either through the
dining-room or by a circuitous detour past the pantries; but our rooms
had a proud little vestibule of their own, with a balcony over the great
square, and if one of them had a belated feather-bed the other had a new
hair mattress, and the whole house was brilliantly lighted with
electricity. As for the cooking, it was delicious, and the table was of
an abundance and variety which might well have made one ashamed of
paying so small a rate as two dollars a day for bed and board, wine
included, and very fair wine at that.
In Spain you must take the bad with the good, for whether you get the
good or not you are sure of the bad, but only very exceptionally are you
sure of the bad only. It was a pleasure not easily definable to find our
hotel managed by a mother and two daughters, who gave the orders obeyed
by the men-servants, and did not rebuke them for joining in the
assurance that when we got used to going so abruptly from the
dining-room into our bedrooms we would like it.
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