Her mind and her opinions were her own, not to be bought from her at any price whatever, and, as such, they were worth something.
The assent or dissent of the fool who agrees or disagrees from fear or love is worth nothing when you've got it.
We finished our luncheon and then, in a hired carriage, drove to the
Plaza de Toros.
I, with a feeling of cold depression, Suzee, gaily dressed and in the highest spirits.
All the city was streaming out in splendid carriage or miserable shay. Rich and cultured, poor and illiterate, human beings are all alike in their love of butchery and blood. We reached the great ragged stretch of open ground, hideous and bare enough, and the structure of the bull-ring reared itself before us, a sinister curve against the laughing blue of the sky.
It seemed to hum like a great hive already; there was a crowd of the poorer class about it, and men came continually in and out of the little doors in its base.
We dismissed our carriage at the outer edge of the ragged ground, the driver insisting he could drive no farther. And the moment we had alighted he turned his horses' heads and started them at a furious gallop back to the city in the hope of catching another fare.
We walked forwards towards the principal of the wickets through which already the people were passing to their seats. In approaching the bull-ring we had to pass by a circle of little buildings, low dens with small barred windows and closed doors. Blood was trickling from under some of these over the brown and dusty earth, and the low, heavy breathing and groans of a horse in agony came from one or another at intervals.
I looked through the grated slit of one, as I passed, and saw two men, or, rather, fiends in the shape of men, crouched on the floor of the dark and noisome den. Between them lay outstretched the body of a horse, old and thin, worn to the last gasp in the cruel service of the streets. On its flank was a long open wound. One of the men, bending over it, had a red-hot iron glowing in his hand. What they were going to do I could not tell, and I did not wait to see.
The horse was one, doubtless, which unhappily had survived last Sunday's bull-fight, and was being horribly patched up, terribly stimulated by agony to expend its last spark of vitality in this.