A Wedding Trip by Emilia Pardo Bazán

A few days' sojourn in Bayonne sufficed to alleviate greatly the pain of Miranda's foot and to make Pilar Gonzalvo and Lucía acquainted, and even in some degree intimate with each other. Like Miranda, Pilar was on her way to Vichy, with the difference that, while what Miranda required of the waters was that they should eliminate the bile from his system, the little Madridlenian was going to the health-giving springs in search of particles of iron to enrich her blood and restore the brilliancy to her lustrous eyes. Eager, like all people of weak and delicate organization, for novelty and excitement, the new friendship with Lucía, the curious incidents of the wedding journey, and the inspection of her bridal finery, which Pilar looked at, article by article, examining the lace on every jacket, the flounces on every dress, the initials on every handkerchief, served to divert her greatly.

Besides, the frank simplicity of the Leonese offered a virgin and uncultivated soil in which to plant the exotic flowers of fashion, and the poison weeds of society scandal. Pilar, at the time we speak of twenty-three years old, had the precocious malice characteristic of young girls who, connected with the aristocracy, through their social relations, and belonging to the middle class, through their antecedents, are familiar with society in all its aspects, and can as easily discover who has given a rendezvous to a duke as who it is that corresponds with the neighbor on the third floor. Pilar Gonzalvo was tolerated in the distinguished houses of Madrid.