Everything was very simple and friendly; Otero
found good seats among the _aficionados_ for the guests presented to
him, and then began calling his pupils to the floor of the long, narrow
room with quick commands of "_Venga_!" A piano was tucked away in a
corner, but the dancers kept time now with castanets and now by snapping
their fingers. Two of the oldest girls, who were apparently graduates,
were "differently beautiful" in their darkness and fairness, but alike
picturesquely Spanish in their vivid dresses and the black veils
fluttering from their high combs. A youth in green velvet jacket and
orange trousers, whose wonderful dancing did him credit as Otero's prize
pupil, took part with them; he had the square-jawed, high-cheek-boned
face of the lower-class Spaniard, and they the oval of all Spanish
women. Here there was no mere posturing and contortioning among the
girls as with the gipsies; they sprang like flames and stamped the floor
with joyous detonations of their slippers. It was their convention to
catch the hat from the head of some young spectator and wear it in a
figure and then toss it back to him. One of them enacted the part of a
_torero_ at a bull-fight, stamping round first in a green satin cloak
which she then waved before a man's felt hat thrown on the ground to
represent the bull hemmed about with _banderillas_ stuck quivering into
the floor.
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