Still, as of old, Spaniards are temperate in food and drink. "It's as rare to see a Spaniard a drunkard as a German sober," wrote Middleton three centuries ago. They use more water than wine, and although they have a grand appetite for sweets, they take them in comparatively simple forms. The national lack of enterprise is conspicuous even here, for dearly as the Spaniard dotes on chocolate and sugar, Madrid does not make her own chocolate creams, but imports them from Paris to sell, when they are too hard to eat, at a price too high to pay.
But smoking and talking are indulgences which Madrileños carry to excess. Lounging on the balcony, a gayly painted case of paper cigarettes at hand, they will pass hours in bantering their wives, whom they worship much as they worship the images of Mary, delighting to dress them in fine clothes and glittering trinkets, and expecting in return, it is said, their pardon for a multitude of sins. And when my lord saunters forth to "rest" in one of the iron chairs that line the promenades, or in a café window, or at an open-air table before one of the frequent stalls of cooling beverages, the women of the house flock together in some airy corner, stitching away on their endless embroideries, and receiving, with "a million kisses" and a chorus of shrill welcomes, the mantilla-veiled ladies who come to call.
If the afternoon is frying hot, it is just possible that the gallivanting don will bethink himself to send home a tray of _horchata_, a snowy, chilly, puckery refreshment, eaten by aid of wafers in the form of little tubes that look and taste much like wrapping paper. This treat gives fresh animation to the emulous tongues. The slightest neighborhood incident, as recounted in such a group, takes on a poetic vividness and a dramatic intensity, and when it is all told over again at the dinner-table, excitement waxes so high that long after the dishes and cloth have been removed the family may still be found seated around the board, flashing a thousand lights of suggestion and surmise on that dull bit of scandal. The husband cannot cease from discussion long enough to read the evening paper, nor the wife to send the little ones to bed, and midnight may find the three generations, from grandfather to four-year-old, still talking with might and main.