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I carried on my shoulder through the streets of Madrid Maria del Carmen de Silva y Azlor de Aragon. She was too proud to admit that she was tired, but was ready to accept the unexampled adventure of being carried in that way. Beside us prattled her brother, Xavier de Silva y Azlor de Aragon, called Chippy for short. They are beautiful, evanescent-looking children, fairies rather than boy and girl, and nothing like the swarthy barefooted urchins who beg of you, who want to clean your boots, who want to sell you water, in every town of Spain. They look as if they had been studied from paintings before they were created. Velasquez painted them, and the children were created from his model—as the shadelike figures of the pictures of El Greco are reproduced in the ballet.

My mind went back to that morose figure of the history-book, Catherine of Aragon—Spain always makes the mind go back. Here I carried Carmen of Aragon on my shoulders, and it might be Henry the Eighth's first Queen, reincarnate as a little child. It is part of the unfairness of the history-book that we only see a woman like Catherine soured and disillusioned and out of her national setting. She is only interesting as the wife who caused the English Reformation, and the mother of Queen Mary of the Smithfield fires. But she may have been some time a happy little child like Carmen, beautiful and innocent, a face to put with the Madonna, to look up at her with flowerlike adoration.