To [Mary Williams Winslow]
[Seville, Spain] [February 1914]
[There are] three theatres here with several pieces in one night: you take a ticket for each piece separately, which costs one franc, and lasts one hour. There is also a cine installed in the Opera House, which on the fashionable nights—Mondays and Thursdays—is crowded with very nice-looking people. The Sevillians are quite charming, in all ranks of life, and handsomer than other Spanish people—a singularly ugly race. To be sure, they would seem more beauteous if they were better washed; the idea of self-scrubbing has only just percolated into the upper strata of society. There is a magnificent shop with plate-glass windows full of bathroom things opposite the Cathedral: it attracts great admiration from the public returning from the Delicias; they stand in wondering family groups before it, as if it contained an exhibition of marbles for the drawing-room and the cemetery—indeed, it looks very much like that sort of thing. I too stop and marvel; on my right the Cathedral—the retreat of art and religion—on my left, the conquering advance of plumbing.
Unless the heat drives me away, I mean to stay here until after the Fair and the bullfights in April, so that I shall have a chance of telling you more about my discoveries and inventions in Seville. When I first arrived I had a touch of my old enemy, the bronchial cough; but I manage to drive it off. It was fearfully cold in the house in Avila and Madrid, also here when I came; but now the sun has come out strong, and the dogs and the cabmen already seek the shade.
Tell Polly I am too old to be worth loving a great deal, because I shall be dead by the time she is old enough to be engaged!
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.