'Not at all,' I said quickly. 'It was only the name that bothered me.'
Of course now I remembered her, but I was concerned at the moment only with the effort to conceal from her the mingled consternation and amusement that filled me as I realized that the Pilar Carreon I had danced with at the Countess de Marbella's parties and at the Fair had turned into this stout, flaunting dowager.
I could not get over it.
But I had to watch my step.
I wondered if she knew how well I recollected the story that had shaken Seville to its foundations, and I was glad when after she had finally bidden me an effusive farewell I was able to recall it at ease.
In those days, forty years ago, Seville had not become a prosperous commercial city.
It had quiet, white streets, paved with cobbles, with a multitude of churches on the belfries of which storks built their nests.
Bull-fighters, students, and loungers sauntered in the Sierpes all day long.
Life was easy.
This of course, was before the time of motor-cars, and the Sevillan would live in penury, practising every possible economy, in order to have a carriage.
For this luxury he was willing to sacrifice the necessities of life.
Everyone who had any claim to gentility drove up and down the Delicias, the park-like gardens by the Guadalquivir, every blessed afternoon from five till seven.
You saw carriages of all sorts, from fashionable London victorias to old broken-down shays that seemed as though they would fall to pieces, magnificent horses and wretched hacks whose tragic end in the bull-ring was near at hand.
But there was one equipage that could not fail to attract the stranger's attention.
It was a victoria, very smart and new, drawn by two beautiful mules; and the coachman and the footman wore the national costume of Andalusia in pale grey.
It was the most splendid turn-out Seville had ever known, and it belonged to the Countess de Marbella.
She was a Frenchwoman married to a Spaniard, who had enthusiastically adopted the manners and customs of her husband's country, but with a Parisian elegance that gave them a peculiar distinction.
The rest of the carriages went at a snail's pace so that their occupants could see and be seen, but the countess, behind her mules, dashed up between the two crawling lines at a fast trot, went to the end of the Delicias and back twice and then drove away.
The proceeding savoured somewhat of royalty.
When you looked at her gracefully seated in that swift victoria, her head handsomely poised, her hair of too brilliant a gold to be natural, you did not wonder that her French vivacity and determination had given her the position she held. She made the fashion.
Her decrees were law.
But the countess had too many adorers not to have as many enemies, and the most determined of these was the widowed Duchess de Dos Palos, whose birth and social consequence made her claim as a right the first place in Society which the Frenchwoman had won by grace, wit and character.
Now the duchess had an only daughter.
This was Dona Pilar.
She was twenty when I first knew her and she was very beautiful.
She had magnificent eyes and a skin that, however hard you tried to find a less hackneyed way to describe it, you could only call peach-like.
She was very slim, rather tall for a Spanish girl, with a red mouth and dazzlingly white teeth.
She wore her abundant, shining black hair dressed very elaborately in the Spanish style of the period.
She was infinitely alluring.
The fire in her black eyes, the warmth of her smile, the seductiveness of her movements suggested so much passion that it really wasn't quite fair.
She belonged to the generation which was straining to break the old conventions that had kept the Spanish girl of good family hidden away till it was time for her to be married.
I often played tennis with her and I used to dance with her at the Countess de Marbella's parties.
The duchess considered the Frenchwoman's parties, with champagne and a sit-down supper, ostentatious, and when she opened her own great house to Society, which was only twice a year, it was to give them lemonade and biscuits.
But she bred fighting-bulls, as her husband had done, and on the occasions when the young bulls were tried out, she gave picnic luncheons to which her friends were asked, very gay and informal, but with a sort of feudal state which fascinated my romantic imagination.
Once, when the duchess's bulls were to fight at acorrida in Seville, I rode in with them at night as one of the men escorting Dona Pilar, dressed in a costume that reminded one of a picture by Goya, who headed the cavalcade.
It was a charming experience to ride through the night, on those prancing Andalusian horses, with the six bulls, surrounded by oxen, thundering along behind.
A good many men, rich or noble and sometimes both, had asked Dona Pilar's hand in marriage, but, notwithstanding her mother's remonstrances, she had refused them.
The duchess had been married at fifteen and it seemed to her really indecent that her daughter at twenty should be still single.
The duchess asked her what she was waiting for; it was absurd to be too difficult.
It was her duty to marry.
But Pilar was stubborn. She found reasons to reject every one of her suitors.
Then the truth came out.
During the daily drives in the Delicias which the duchess, accompanied by her daughter, took in a great old-fashioned landau, they passed the countess as she was twice swiftly driven up and down the promenade.
The ladies were on such bad terms that they pretended not to see one another, but Pilar could not keep her eyes off that smart carriage and the two beautiful grey mules and, not wishing to catch the countess's somewhat ironic glance, her own fell on the coachman who drove her.
He was the handsomest man in Seville and in his beautiful uniform he was a sight to see.
Of course no one knew exactly what happened, but apparently the more Pilar looked at the coachman the more she liked the look of him, and somehow or other, for all this part of the story remained a mystery, the pair met.
In Spain the classes are strangely mingled and the butler may have in his veins much nobler blood than the master.
Pilar learnt, not I think without satisfaction, that the coachman belonged to the ancient family of Leon, than which there is none in Andalusia more distinguished; and really so far as birth went there was little to choose between them.
Only her life had been passed in a ducal mansion, while fate had forced him to earn his living on the box of a victoria.
Neither could regret this, since only in that exalted place could he have attracted the attention of the most difficult young woman in Seville.