English seemed meant to open the way for talk, and we were willing he
should do the talking. He spoke without a trace of accent, and we at
once imagined circles in which it was now as _chic_ for Spaniards to
speak English as it once was to speak French. They are said never to
speak French quite well; but nobody could have spoken English better
than this gentleman, not even we who were, as he said he supposed,
English. Truth and patriotism both obliged us to deny his conjecture;
and when He intimated that he would not have known us for Americans
because we did not speak with the dreadful American accent, I hazarded
my belief that this dreadfulness was personal rather than national. But
he would not have it. Boston people, yes; they spoke very well, and he
allowed other exceptions to the general rule of our nasal twang, which
his wife summoned English enough to say was very ugly. They had suffered
from it too universally in the Americans they had met during the summer
in Germany to believe it was merely personal; and I suppose one may own
to strictly American readers that our speech _is_ dreadful, that it is
very ugly. These amiable Spaniards had no reason and no wish to
wound; and they could never know what sweet and noble natures had been
producing their voices through their noses there in Germany. I for my
part could not insist; who, indeed, can defend the American accent,
which is not so much an accent as a whiffle, a snuffle, a twang? It was
mortifying, all the same, to have it openly abhorred by a foreigner, and
I willingly got away from the question to that of the weather. We agreed
admirably about the heat in England where this gentleman went every
summer, and had never found it so hot before. It was hot even in
Denmark; but he warned me not to expect any warmth in Spain now that the
autumn rains had begun.

If this couple represented a cosmopolitan and modern Spain, it was
interesting to escape to something entirely native in the three young
girls who got in at the next station and shared our compartment with us
as far as we went. They were tenderly kissed by their father in putting
them on board, and held in lingering farewells at the window till the
train started. The eldest of the three then helped in arranging their
baskets in the rack, but the middle sister took motherly charge of the
youngest, whom she at once explained to us as _enferma._ She was
the prettiest girl of the conventional Spanish type we Lad y