We Did Not Think There Were So Many Boys, Proportionately, Or Boys Let
Loose, In Madrid As In The Other Towns We Had Seen, And We Remarked To
That Sort Of Foreign Sojourner Who Is So Often Met In Strange Cities
That The Children Seemed Like Little Men And Women.
"Yes," he said, "the
Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or forty, and then they
never grow up." It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have caught
at a fact.
From another foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism
of Spain, in spite of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many
bold novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. But how far
the severity of the church characterizes manners it would be hard to
say. Perhaps these are often the effect of temperament. One heard more
than one saw of the indifference of shop-keepers to shoppers in Madrid;
in Andalusia, say especially in Seville, one saw nothing of it. But from
the testimony of sufferers it appears to be the Madrid shop-keeper's
reasonable conception that if a customer comes to buy something it is
because he, or more frequently she, wants it and is more concerned than
himself in the transaction. He does not put himself about in serving
her, and if she intimates that he is rudely indifferent, and that though
she has often come to him before she will never come again, he remains
tranquil. From experience I cannot say how true this is; but certainly I
failed to awaken any lively emotion in the booksellers of whom I tried
to buy some modern plays.
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