At Madrid they scarcely wanted our tickets at the gate of
the station, and we found ourselves in the soft embrace of modernity, so
dear after the feudal rigors of Old Castile, when we mounted into a
motor-bus and sped away through the spectacular town, so like Paris, so
like Rome as to have no personality of its own except in this
similarity, and never stopped till the liveried service swarmed upon us
at the door of the Hotel Ritz.
Here the modernity which had so winningly greeted us at the station
welcomed us more and consolingly. There was not only steam-heating, but
the steam was on! It wanted but a turn of the hand at the radiators, and
the rooms were warm. The rooms themselves responded to our appeal and
looked down into a silent inner court, deaf to the clatter of the
streets, and sleep haunted the very air, distracted, if at all, by the
instant facility and luxury of the appliances. Was it really in Spain
that a metallic tablet at the bed-head invited the wanderer to call with
one button for the _camerero,_ another for the _camerera,_ and another
for the _mozo,_ who would all instantly come speaking English like so
many angels? Were we to have these beautiful chambers for a humble two
dollars and forty cents a day; and if it was true, why did we ever leave
them and try for something ever so much worse and so very little
cheaper? Let me be frank with the reader whom I desire for my friend,
and own that we were frightened from the Eitz Hotel by the rumor of Eitz
prices.
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