“To the life!” cried Patsy.
Villegas rubbed his fingers over the canvas; “It needs a little scraping down,” he said, “a little repainting, the color is too thick. It is like her, yes? Quien sabé! She is different from the
IMPERIO. Villegas
rest. When she falls in love and marries she will be like the others. You have seen, I have tried to paint the first dancer of Spain in her flower.” Then he went with the dancers to the door.
“Villegas says,” Patsy quoted him, “‘that an artist should leave behind him a true picture of his own time; that he should be like a phonograph, preserving the character of his own period to posterity. The matador and the dancing girl are two of the most characteristic figures of the Spain of his day; he has painted both supremely well: he seems to be doing the thing he set out to do!’”
All too soon after the fiesta came the day we had fixed to leave Madrid. Not till then did I realize the strength of the spell Spain had laid upon me. We were going to Rome—even that could not console me—for the spell of Spain, so dark, so noble, so tremendous, is not to be shaken off once you have yielded to it.
The promise the child made so lightly, “to see Spain, and tell the other children what it is like,” has yet to be kept. I did not begin to see Spain, I have told but a halting story of what I did see. It was enough to make me love Spain, to love the Spaniards. They are more like us Anglo-Saxons than any people I have lived among. Villegas says, “In every one of us Spaniards there is a Sancho Panza, and a Don Quixote.” That is as true of us as it is of them.