tea, and in some places you cannot get it cold for love or money.

But again I leave myself waiting in that cafe, where slowly, and at last
not very overwhelmingly in number, the beautiful plaster-pale Spanish
ladies gather with their husbands and have chocolate. It is a riotous
dissipation for them, though it does not sound so; the home is the
Spanish ideal of the woman's place, as it is of our anti-suffragists,
though there is nothing corresponding to our fireside in it; and the
cafe is her husband's place without her. When she walks in the street,
where mostly she drives, she walks with her eyes straight before her; to
look either to the right or left, especially if a man is on either hand,
is a superfluity of naughtiness. The habit of looking straight ahead is
formed in youth, and it continues through life; so at least it is said,
and if I cannot affirm it I will not deny it. The beautiful black eyes
so discreetly directed looked as often from mantillas as hats, even in
Madrid, which is the capital, and much infested by French fashions. You
must not believe it when any one tells you that the mantilla is going
out; it prevails everywhere, and it increases from north to south, and
in Seville it is almost universal. Hats are worn there only in driving,
but at Madrid there were many hats worn in walking, though whether by
Spanish women or by foreigners, of course one could not, though a
wayfaring man and an American, stop them to ask.

There are more women in the street at Madrid than in the provincial
cities, perhaps because it is the capital and cosmopolitan, and perhaps
because the streets are many of them open and pleasant, though there arc
enough of them dark and narrow, too. I do not know just why the Puerta
del Sol seems so much ampler and gayer than the Calle de Alcala; it is
not really wider, but it seems more to concentrate the coming and going,
and with its high-hoteled opposition of corners is of a supreme