A feral gipsy from Triana, this apparition; a _cigarrera_ in the Fábrica de Tobacos for the sake of the "affairs of Egypt"; a true gitana in her _saya_ "with many rows of flounces." Any day in the streets of Seville could you have seen her like, peering through the gratings into the patios, ready to tell _bahi_. "Eyes of a gipsy, eyes of a wolf" is a Spanish proverb, according to Mérimée, and Borrow tells us that a gitano can always be detected by his eye: "Its peculiarity consists chiefly in a strange staring expression, which to be understood must be seen, and in a thin glaze which steals over it when in repose, and seems to emit phospheric light."... So, did it seem to me, had become the eyes of Mary Garden. This discinct creature, instinctively paradoxical, would be equally at home in the spinnies of the arid Spanish plains, on the dirty stage of a _maison de danses_ at Triana, or, gaily bedecked and spangled, like a "bedizened butterfly of commerce" in a box of the Plaza de Toros. Sensuous and caline, as in the Seguidilla, rubbing her velvet back against the _canari_; proud and magnetic (she must have carried a piece of the _bar lachi_ about with her), she drew her lovers to her side; she did not advance to meet them. White hot in anger: other Carmens have hurled the helmet after the departing José; Mary Garden _shot_ it at him like a bursting hand grenade. Fatalist: cabalistic signs smouldering in purple flame on her breast, in the end published this motto in Roman letters: "_Je ne crains rien!_" When she danced she scarcely lifted her feet from the floor, tapping her heels rhythmically and sensuously into the hidden chambers of our brains; so the inquisitors maddened their victims with the endless drop, drop, drop of water. Her manipulation of her fan, a monstrous Spanish fan, coral on one side and with tauromachian decorations on the other, was in itself a lesson in diabolic grace. She made the fan a part of herself, a part of her movement, as a Spanish woman would.... The climax was fitting enough; her answer to José in the last act, "_Non, je ne t'aime plus_," sung not with force, not in anger, but with a sort of amused contempt.... So does the gipsy regard the busno ... _with a sort of amused contempt_. Fatalist, humourist, enchantress, panther, savage, _gamine_, in turn, this Carmen suggested the virgin brutality of Spain, the austere portentous passion of Persephone, the frivolous devilments of Hell itself. _June 20, 1918._ FOOTNOTES: