anger or prejudice. She
talked herself out, as he had talked himself out. He waited and then
he left her and crossed to the other corner. She called after him as he
kept on down the street. She turned away, but stopped, and turned again
and called after him till he passed from sight. Then she turned once
more and went her own way. Nobody minded, any more than if they had been
two unhappy ghosts invisibly and inaudibly quarreling, but I remained,
and remain to this day, afflicted because of the mystery of their
dispute.

We did not think there were so many boys, proportionately, or boys let
loose, in Madrid as in the other towns we had seen, and we remarked to
that sort of foreign sojourner who is so often met in strange cities
that the children seemed like little men and women. "Yes," he said, "the
Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or forty, and then they
never grow up." It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have caught
at a fact. From another foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism
of Spain, in spite of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many
bold novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. But how far
the severity of the church characterizes manners it would be hard to
say. Perhaps these are often the effect of temperament. One heard more
than one saw of the indifference of shop-keepers to shoppers in Madrid;
in Andalusia, say especially in Seville, one saw nothing of it. But from
the testimony of sufferers it appears to be the Madrid shop-keeper's
reasonable conception that if a customer comes to buy something it is
because he, or more frequently she, wants it and is more concerned than
himself in the transaction. He does not put himself about in serving
her, and if she intimates that he is rudely indifferent, and that though
she has often come to him before she will never come again, he remains
tranquil. From experience I cannot say how true this is; but certainly
I failed to awaken any lively emotion in the booksellers of whom I tried
to buy some modern plays. It seemed to me that I was vexing them in the
Oriental calm which they would have preferred to my money, or even my
interest in the new Spanish drama. But in a shop where fans were sold,
the shopman, taken in an unguarded moment, seemed really to enter into
the spirit of our selection for friends at home; he even corrected my
wrong accent in the Spanish word for fan, which was certainly going a
great way.