Yet, As I Say, Madrid Was Very Well Indeed, And When I Reflected I Had To Own That I Had Come There On Purpose To Be There, And Not To Be In Rome, Where Also I Should Have Been So Satisfied To Be.

IV I do not know but we chose our hotel when we left the Ritz because it was so Italian, so Roman.

It had a wide grape arbor before it, with a generous spread of trellised roof through which dangled the grape bunches among the leaves of the vine. Around this arbor at top went a balustrade of marble, with fat _putti,_ or marble boys, on the corners, who would have watched over the fruit if they had not been preoccupied with looking like so many thousands of _putti_ in Italy. They looked like Italian _putti_ with a difference, the difference that passes between all the Spanish things and the Italian things they resemble. They were coarser and grosser in figure, and though amiable enough in aspect, they lacked the refinement, the air of pretty appeal which Italian art learns from nature to give the faces of _putti._ Yet they were charming, and it was always a pleasure to look at them posing in pairs at the corners of the balustrade, and I do not know but dozing in the hours of _siesta._ If they had been in wood Spanish art would have known how to make them better, but in stone they had been gathering an acceptable weather stain during the human generations they had been there, and their plump stomachs were weather-beaten white.

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