opportunity of describing his drawing-room.

In Spain things are different. If the count chose to live in his
own cellar, his neighbours would shrug their shoulders and throw the
end of their capes well over to the back. That was surely the
business of the count.

Moreover, Cipriani de Lloseta was not the sort of man of whom it is
easy to ask questions. His was the pride of pride, which is a vice
unbreakable. When the Moors went to Majorca in the eighth century
they found Llosetas there, and Llosetas were left behind eight
hundred years later, when the southern conqueror was driven back to
his dark land. Among his friends it is known that Cipriani de
Lloseta lived alone because he was faithful to the memory of one
who, but for the hand of God, would have lived with him until she
was an old woman, filling, perhaps, the great gloomy house in the
Calle de la Paz with the prattle of children's voices, with the
clatter of childish feet in the marble passages.

The younger women looked at him surreptitiously, and asked each
other what sort of wife this must have been; while their elders
shrugged their ample shoulders with a strange little Catalonian
contraction of the eyes, and said -

"It is not so much the woman herself as that which the man makes
her."

For they are wise, these stout and elderly ladies. They were once
young, and they learnt the lesson.