The Frequent Holidays Afford Them
An Outlet, And Indoors They Constantly See Their Friends And Kindred At
Their _Tertulias._
The land is in large holdings which are managed by the factors or agents
of the noble proprietors.
These, when they are not at Madrid, are to be
found at their clubs, where their business men bring them papers to be
signed, often unread. This sounds a little romantic, and perhaps it is
not true. Some gentlemen take a great interest in the bull-feasts and
breed the bulls and cultivate the bull-fighters; what other esthetic
interests they have I do not know. All classes are said to be of an
Oriental philosophy of life; they hold that the English striving and
running to and fro and seeing strange countries comes in the end to the
same thing as sitting still; and why should they bother? There is
something in that, but one may sit still too much; the Spanish ladies,
as I many times heard, do overdo it. Not only they do not walk abroad;
they do not walk at home; everything is carried to and from them; they
do not lift hand or foot. The consequence is that they have very small
hands and feet; Gautier, who seems to have grown tired when he reached
Seville, and has comparatively little to say of it, says that a child
may hold a Sevillian lady's foot in its hand; he does not say he saw it
done. What is true is that no child could begin to clasp with both hands
the waist of an average Sevillian lady.
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