40 CASTILIAN DAYS
handsome incomes are so universally esteemed by all who know them. The stars on the sleeves of young officers are more regarded than their dancing, and the red belt of a field officer is as winning in the eyes of beauty as a cestus of Venus. A. subaltern offered his hand and heart to a black-eyed girl of Castile. She said kindly but firmly that the night was too cloudy. "What," said the stupefied lover, "the sky is full of stars." "I see but one," said the prudent beauty, her fine eyes resting pensively upon his cuff, where one lone luminary indicated his rank.
This spirit is really one of forethought, and not avarice. People who have enough for two almost always marry from inclination, and frequently take partners for life without a penny.
If men were never henpecked except by learned wives, Spain would be the place of all others for timid men to marry in. The girls are bright, vivacious, and naturally very clever, but they have scarcely any education whatever. They never know the difference between b and v. They throw themselves in orthography entirely upon your benevolence. They know a little music and a little French, but they have never crossed, even in a school-day
SPANISH LIVING AND DYING 41
excursion, the border line of the ologies. They do not even read novels. They are regarded as injurious, and cannot be trusted to the daughters until mamma has read them. Mamma never has time to read them, and so they are condemned by default. Fernán Caballero, in one of her sleepy little romances, refers to this illiterate character of the Spanish ladies, and says it is their chief charm,--that a Christian woman, in good society, ought not to know anything beyond her cookery-book and her missal.' There is-an old proverb which coarsely conveys this idea: A mule that whinnies and a woman that talks Latin never come to any good.
There is a contented acquiescence in this moral servitude among the fair Spaniards which would madden our agitatresses. (See what will become of the language when male words are crowded out of the dictionary!)
It must be the innocence which springs from ignorance that induces an occasional coarseness of expression which surprises you in the conversation of those lovely young girls. They will speak with perfect freedom of the état-civil of a young unmarried mother. A maiden of fifteen said to me: "I must go to a party this evening décolletée, and I hate