most the last
gasps of a Spain of European influence. He lifted a heavy curtain and
entered the spacious salon, where the people at the other end looked
like little wax figures under the dull illumination of the skylights.

The artist continued straight ahead, scarcely noticing the pictures, old
acquaintances that could tell him nothing new. His eyes sought the
people without, however, finding in them any greater novelty. It seemed
as though they formed a part of the building and had not moved from it
in many years; good-natured fathers with a group of children before
their knees, explaining the meaning of the pictures; a school teacher,
with her well-behaved and silent pupils who, in obedience to the command
of their superior, passed without stopping before the lightly clad
saints; a gentleman with two priests, talking loudly, to show that he
was intelligent and almost at home there; several foreign ladies with
their veils caught up over their straw hats and their coats on their
arms, consulting the catalogue, all with a sort of family-air, with
identical expressions of admiration and curiosity, until Renovales
wondered if they were the same ones he had seen there years before, the
last time he was there.

As he passed, he greeted the great masters mentally; on one side the
holy figures of El Greco, with their greenish or bluish spirituality,
slender and undulating; beyond, the wrinkled, black heads of Ribera,
with ferocious expressions of torture and pain--marvelous artists, whom
Renovales admired, while determined not to imitate them. Afterwards,
between the railing that protects the pictures and the line of busts,
show-cases and marble tables supported by gilded lions, he came upon the
easels of several copyists. They were boys from the School of Fine Arts,
or poverty-stricken young ladies with run-down heels and dilapidated
hats, who were copying Murillos. They were tracing on the canvas the
blue of the Virgin's robe or the plump flesh of the curly-haired boys
that played with the Divine Lamb. Their copies were commissions from
pious people; a _genre_ that found an easy sale among the benefactors of
convents and oratories. The smoke of the candles, the wear of years, the
blindness of devotion would dim the colors, and some day the eyes of the
worshipers, weeping in supplication, would see the celestial figures
move with mysterious life on their blackened background, as they
implored from them wondrous miracles.