The women's clothes were just from Paris, and
the men's from London, but their customs, I suppose, were national; the
women sat on one side of the table and talked across it to the men,
while they ate and drank, and then each sex grouped itself apart and
talked to its kind, the women in those hardened vowels of a dialect from
which the Andalusians for conversational purposes have eliminated all
consonants. The sun was setting red and rayless, with a play of many
lights and tints, over the landscape up to the snow-line on the Sierra.
The town lay a stretch of gray roofs and white walls, intermixed with
yellow poplars and black cypresses, and misted over with smoke from the
chimneys of the sugar factories. The mountains stood flat against the
sky, purple with wide stretches of brown, and dark, slanting furrows.
The light became lemon-yellow before nightfall, and then a dull crimson
under pale violet.
The twitter of the Spanish women was overborne at times by the voices of
an American party whose presence I was rather proud of as another
American. They were all young men, and they were making an educational
tour of the world in the charge of a professor who saw to it that they
learned as much of its languages and history and civilization as
possible on the way.
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