Salamanca is a land of little cities, of tight, insulate worlds with a thousand or five hundred souls. A crude land and a people whose spirit the land encases. A crustaceous people.... A tiny river is nearby, else there could be no town. The houses ray out upon the turf like regimented snails. Windows are spots in a chalky shell. The door, within a triangular cut of the house (as if the reclusion made it less penetrable) is massive oak impounded with iron or with copper. It is divided horizontally, so that the housewife can open the upper half and talk and trade, and yet be locked within her tiny castle. She is locked ever within herself. Her garb is black. When she goes forth to market in the village square (here bulls are fought on holy-days), there is a black shawl over her black hair and very close to her eyes. The face is beautiful. The skin, color of parchment, ages silken soft. The jaw is round and unassertive. The nose is straight, the mouth is thin and large. Passion, here, and right are not separate claimants to her soul. All this peasant woman’s will and all her duty unison from girlhood to the grave. Service to God and service to her man, the sacraments of communion and of love, the tasks of household and of motherhood ... are one and have one word in her plain mind. They are life itself: like God a unity which miracle divides into three persons. And she is like her hearthfire, this woman of Old Castile: fecund and ensconced. She is the light of her shut home. She has jealous distrust of sun and of the open air. They are her rivals and she bars them out with her tiny windows and her divided door.