I Was Always Proud Of This Success, And I Boasted Of It To The
Bookseller In Madrid, Whom I Interested In Finding Me Some Still
Moderner Plays After Quite Failing To Interest Another Bookseller.
Your
Spanish merchant seems seldom concerned in a mercantile transaction; but
perhaps it was not so strange in the case of this Spanish bookseller
because he was a German and spoke a surprising English in response to my
demand whether he spoke any.
He was the frowsiest bookseller I ever saw,
and he was in the third day of his unshavenness with a shirt-front and
coat-collar plentifully bedandruffed from his shaggy hair; but he
entered into the spirit of my affair and said if that Spanish play had
succeeded so wonderfully, then I ought to pay fifty per cent, more than
the current price for the other Spanish plays which I wanted him to get
me. I laughed with him at the joke which I found simple earnest when our
glowing concierge gave me the books next day, and I perceived that the
proposed supplement had really been paid for them on my account. I
should not now be grieving for this incident if the plays had proved
better reading than they did on experiment. Some of them were from the
Catalan, and all of them dealt with the simpler actual life of Spain;
but they did not deal impressively with it, though they seemed to me
more hopeful in conception than certain psychological plays of ten or
fifteen years ago, which the Spanish authors had too clearly studied
from Ibsen.
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