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In the plaza pretty flower-girls with tempting bouquets mingle with fruit venders, lottery-ticket sellers, and dashing young Mexican dudes, wearing broad sombreros heavy with cords of silver braid. Occasionally there passes some dignified señora, whose head and shoulders are covered with a black lace mantilla, imparting infinite grace to her handsome figure.
* The costume usually worn by peasant women in Navarre and the Basque Provinces. "She was wearing a very short skirt, below which her white silk stockings with more than one hole in them and her dainty red morocco shoes, fastened with flame-coloured ribbons, were clearly seen. She had thrown her mantilla back, to show her shoulders, and a great bunch of acacia that was thrust into her chemise.
It appears the world is changed; girls in her day were never allowed to romp that way, and men used to have some manners. Things have come to a pretty pass! "'Alida, is that you, dear? You look dull. "'Oh, Henrietta! I have torn my beautiful thread-lace mantilla all to rags; it's ruined for ever. And do you know oh, I don't know how I shall ever dare to face ma again!
I felt soft carpets underfoot, and on the walls hung some tapestry or rug of an amazingly intricate geometrical pattern, but with every strand as rich as jewels. There, between the pillars, she turned and faced me. Her furs were thrown back, and the black mantilla had slipped down to her shoulders. 'I have heard of you, she said. 'You are called Richard Hanau, the American.
He thinks that even now men are waiting to kill him as he rides from my house. To escape he says he will dress in my clothes, my red skirt and the blue waist I wear and the brown mantilla over the head, and thus ride away.
The lady was a beautiful person, with lustrous black eyes and dark hair, over which a lace mantilla was fastened with diamond stars.
She continued to advance along the path with somewhat lagging steps.... Arátoff followed her as before, and as before saw only her little old mantilla and her small hat, which was not quite new either. His vanity suffered at the thought that she must now be thinking: "All I had to do was to make a sign, and he immediately hastened to me!"
Bonnets, for years microscopic, had again become visible, and her girlish face was prettily set in one whose flowers and ribbon, just joyous and no more, were reflected again in the double-skirted silk barége; while the dark mantilla that drooped away from the broad lace collar, shading, without hiding, her "Parodi" waist, seemed made for that very street of heavy-grated archways, iron-railed balconies, and high lattices.
What an extraordinarily living presence he was, so that a word from him was almost like an actual personal contact. But she took care not to show this. She looked down casually at the soft, opaque folds of her wrap. "Oh, this is a thousand years old. It dates from the Bayonne days. It's Basque. It's their variation, I imagine, on the Spanish mantilla. They never wear hats, the Basque women.
And the madre, she's so 'fraid of them automobiles. She cries yet when she knows I ride in one a little bit. Now she's so proud, when I drive the new buggy home! She folds so pretty her best mantilla over her head and rides with me to church, and she bows so polite to all the señoras from the new buggy! And her face shines with the happiness in her heart. Oh, no, not me for the big automobile!"
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