There was a great number of women present, and I remarked very many pretty ones among them. The Malagueña is remarkable for the pale, golden uniformity of her complexion, tinging her cheek no more than it does her forehead, for her long oval face, the bright carnation of her lips, the delicacy of her nose, and the brilliancy of her Arabian eyes, which any one might suppose were tinged with henna, on account of the length the eyelashes extend towards the temples. I do not know whether we must attribute it to the severe folds of drapery round their faces, but they have a serious, passionate look, which is completely Eastern in its character, and which is not possessed by the women of Madrid, Granada, or Seville, who are smaller, more graceful, and more _coquet_, and always thinking somewhat of the effect they produce. I saw some admirable heads, superb types, by which the painters of the Spanish school have not sufficiently profited, and which would furnish an artist of talent with matter for a series of precious and entirely new studies. According to our notions, it appears strange that women can like to witness a performance, in which the lives of human beings are every moment in danger, where blood flows in large pools, and where the wretched horses are gored until their feet get entangled in their own intestines; a person unacquainted with the true state of the case would be very likely to imagine that women who could do this were brazen-faced, shameless creatures, but he would be greatly mistaken. Never did more gentle, Madonna-like faces, more silken eyelashes, or more gentle smiles ever watch over a sleeping child. The various chances of the bull's death are attentively observed by pale, lovely beings, of whom an elegiac poet would be glad to make an Elvira. The merit of the different thrusts is discussed by mouths so pretty that you would fain hear them talk of nothing but love. Because they behold unmoved scenes of carnage which would cause our sensitive Parisian beauties to faint, it must not be inferred that they are cruel and deficient in tenderness of soul; in spite of their presence at such sights, they are good, simple-minded, and full of compassion for the unfortunate. But custom is everything; the sanguinary side of a bull-fight, which is what strikes foreigners the most forcibly, is exactly that which least interests Spaniards, who devote their whole attention to the importance of the different blows and the amount of address displayed by the _toreros_, who do not run so great a risk as might at first be imagined.