The legendary Spanish lady is forever sitting at a barred window, or leaning from a balcony, coquetting with a fan and dropping arch responses to the "caramel phrases" of her guitar-tinkling cavalier.
"You're always saying you'd die for me. I doubt it nevertheless; But prove it true by dying, And then I'll answer yes."
For, loving as they are, Spanish sweethearts take naturally to teasing. "When he calls me his Butterfly, I call him my Elephant. Then his eyes are like black fire, for he is ashamed to be so big, but in a twinkling I can make him smile again." The scorn of these dainty creatures for the graces of the ruling sex is not altogether affected. I shall not forget the expression with which a Sevillian belle, an exquisite dancer, watched her _novio_ as, red and perspiring, he flung his stout legs valiantly through the mazes of the _jota_. "Men are uglier than ever when they are dancing, aren't they?" she remarked to me with all the serenity in the world. And a bewitching maiden in Madrid, as I passed some favorable comment upon the photographs of her two brothers, gave a deprecatory shrug. "Handsome? _Ca!_" (Which is _no_ many times intensified.) "But they are not so ugly, either,--_for men_."
The style of compliment addressed by _caballeros_ to señoritas is not like "the quality of mercy," but very much strained indeed. "Your eyes are two runaway stars, that would rather shine in your face than in heaven, but your heart is harder than the columns of Solomon's temple. Your father was a confectioner and rubbed your lips with honey-cakes." Little Consuelo, or Lagrimas, or Milagros, or Dolores, or Peligros laughs it off, "Ah, now you are throwing flowers."
The _coplas_ of the wooer below the balcony are usually sentimental.
"By night I go to the patio, And my tears in the fountain fall, To think that I love you so much, And you love me not at all."
"Sweetheart, little Sweetheart! Love, my Love! I can't see thy eyes For the lashes above. Eyes black as midnight, Lashes black as grief! O, my heart is thirsty As a summer leaf."
"If I could but be buried In the dimple of your chin, I would wish, Dear, that dying Might at once begin."
"If thou wilt be a white dove, I will be a blue. We'll put our bills together And coo, coo, coo."