our guide took us for lunch. To this day I do not know why that landlord
should have been so sour; his lunch was bad, but I paid his price
without murmuring; and still at parting he could scarcely restrain his
rage; the Escorial might have entered into his soul. On the way to his
hotel the street was empty, but the house bubbled over with children who
gaped giggling at his guests from the kitchen door, and were then
apparently silenced with food, behind it. There were a great many flies
in the hotel, and if I could remember its name I would warn the public
against it.

After lunch our guide lapsed again to our conductor and reappeared with
his motor-bus and took us to the station, where he overcame the scruples
of the lady in the ticket-office concerning our wish to return to Madrid
by the Sud-Express instead of the ordinary train. The trouble was about
the supplementary fare which we easily paid on board; in fact, there is
never any difficulty in paying a supplementary fare in Spain; the
authorities meet you quite half-way. But we were nervous because we had
already suffered from the delays of people at the last hotel where our
motor-bus stopped to take up passengers; they lingered so long over
lunch that we were sure we should miss the Sud-Express, and we did not
see how we could live in Escorial till the way-train started; yet for
all their delays we reached the station in time and more. The train
seemed strangely reduced in the number of its cars, but we confidently
started with others to board the nearest of them; there we were waved
violently away, and bidden get into the dining-car at the rear of the
train. In some dudgeon we obeyed, but we were glad to get away from
Escorial on any terms, and the dining-car was not bad, though it had a
somewhat disheveled air. We could only suppose that all the places in
the two other cars were taken, and we resigned ourselves to choosing the
least coffee-stained of the coffee-stained tables and ordered more