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. But the prettiest thing was the dancing of two little girl pupils, one fair and thin and of an angelic gracefulness, and the other plump and dark, who was as dramatic as the blond was lyrical. They accompanied themselves with castanets, and, though the little fatling toed in and wore a common dress of blue-striped gingham, I am afraid she won our hearts from her graceful rival. Both were very serious and gave their whole souls to the dance, but they were not more childishly earnest than an older girl in black who danced with one of the gaudy graduates, panting in her anxious zeal and stopping at last with her image of the Virgin she resembled flung wildly down her back from the place where it had hung over her heart.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 272 of 376
Words from 74352 to 74633 of 103320