Madrid Royal Palace
One chilly November afternoon, gray with a fog that had utterly swallowed the Eiffel Tower above its first huge uprights, which straddled disconsolately like legs forsaken of their giant, she explained in a sudden rush of words why Spain had been worsted in the war with America.
"Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. As with persons, so with nations. Those that are not of His fold He gives over to their fill of vainglory and greed and power, but the Catholic nations He cleanses again and again in the bitter waters of defeat—ah, in fire and blood! Yet the end is not yet. The rod of His correction is upon Spain at this hour, and the Faithful are glad in the very heart of sorrow, for even so shall her sins be purged away, even so shall her coldness be quickened, even so shall she be made ready for her everlasting recompense."
"And the poor Protestant nations?" I asked, between a smile and a sigh.
The little sister smiled back, but the Catholic eyes, for all their courtly graciousness, were implacable.
She was of a titled family and had passed a petted childhood in Madrid. There she had been taken, on her seventh birthday, to a corrida de toros, but remembered it unpleasantly, not because of the torture inflicted on the horses and bulls, but because she had been frightened by the great beasts, with their tossing horns and furious bellowing. Horns always made her think of the devil, she said. From her babyhood she had been afraid of horns.
One day a mischievous impulse led me to inquire, in connection with a chat about the Escorial, "And how do you like Philip II?"
The black eyes shot one ray of sympathetic merriment, but the Spaniard and the nun were on their guard.
"He was a very good Catholic," she replied demurely.
"So was Isabel la Católica," I responded. "But don't you think she may have been a trifle more agreeable?"