Gallardo assented with an enigmatic smile.... Put the bulls in his pocket! He wished for nothing better. But ay! lately they had become so big and so intractable! They had grown so enormously since he last trod the arena!
Gambling was Gallardo's consolation, making him forget his anxieties for the moment; and with fresh energy he returned to the green table to lose his money, surrounded by his former friends, who did not care in the least about his failures as long as he was an "elegant" torero.
One night they all went to supper at the inn at Eritana, a festivity given in honour of some foreign ladies of gay life, with whom some of the young men had become acquainted in Paris. They had come to Seville in order to see the festival of the Holy Week and the fair, and were anxious to see all that was most picturesque in the place.
Consequently they wished to become acquainted with the celebrated torero, the most elegant of all the espadas, that Gallardo whose portrait they had so often admired in popular prints and on the tops of match-boxes.
The gathering was held in the large dining-room of Eritana, a pavilion in the gardens, decorated in extremely bad taste with vulgar imitations of the Moorish splendours of the Alhambra.
Gallardo was greeted as a demigod by these three women, who, ignoring their other friends, quarrelled for the honour of sitting beside him. In a way they reminded him of the absent one, with their golden hair and elegant dresses, and their all-pervading perfumes produced a kind of bewilderment.
The presence of his friends helped to make the remembrance still more vivid. All were friends of Doña Sol, many even belonged to her family, and he had come to look on these as relations.
They all ate and drank with that almost savage voracity usual at nocturnal feasts, where every one goes with the fullest intention of exceeding in everything, a gipsy band stationed at the further end of the room intoning their somewhat melancholy songs, varied by sprightly dance music, added to the general hilarity.
By midnight all were more or less tipsy, but Gallardo in his cups was sad and gloomy. Ay! for that other one ... for the real gold of her hair! The golden hair of these women was artificial, their skin was thick and coarse, hardened by cosmetics, and through all their perfumes his imagination detected an atmosphere of innate vulgarity. Ay! for that other one ... that other one.