But he went on, since the occasion seemed to demand it, giving a gay account of the beauty which he remembered so intensely because it had framed his agony; how the next day, under a sky that was temporarily pale and amiable because this was early spring, he had ridden down the long road between the brown heathy pastures to the blue barren downland that lies under the black mountains, and had come at last to a winding path that led not only through space but through time, for it ran nimbly in and out among the seasons.  It travelled under the rosy eaves of a forest of blossoming almond up to a steep as haggard with weather as a Scotch moor, and dipped again to hedges of aloes and cactus and asphodel.  At one moment a spindrift of orange blossom blew about him; at another he had watched the peasants in their brown capes stripping their dark green orange-groves and piling the golden globes into the panniers of donkeys which were gay with magenta tassels.  At one time there was trouble getting the horse up the icy trail, yet a little later it was treading down the irises and jonquils and bending its head to snuff the rosemary.  So on, beauty all the way, and infinitely variable, all the many days’ journey to the coast, where the mountain drops suddenly to the surf and reflects the Mediterranean sky as a purple glamour on its snowy crest.  Ah, such a country!

He meant to go at that, for his listeners were now like honey-drugged bees:  to toss his papers on the table, go out, and let the situation settle itself after his departure.  But Mr. Philip said, “But surely they’re crool.  Bullfights and that—­”

He could not let that pass.  “You don’t understand.  It’s different over there.”

“Surely right’s right and wrong’s wrong, wherever you are?” said Mr. Philip.

“No.  Spain’s a place, as I said, where one travels in time as well as in space....”  He didn’t himself agree that the bullfight was so much crueller than most organised activities of men.  From the bull’s point of view, indeed, it was a nobler way of becoming roast beef than any other and gave him the chance of drawing blood for blood; and the toreador’s life was good, as all dangerous lives are.  But of course there were the horses; he shuddered at his unspoken memory of a horse stumbling from the arena at Seville with a riven belly and hanging entrails that gleamed like mother-o’-pearl.  Oh, yes, he admitted, it was cruel; or, rather, would be if it were committed by a people like ourselves.  But it wasn’t.  That was the point he wanted to make.  When one travelled far back in time.  It was hard for us—­“for you, especially,” he amplified, with a courteous, enthusiastic flinging out of his hand, “with your unparalleled Scotch system of education”—­to comprehend the mentality of a people which had been prevented, by the economic insanity of its governors and the determination of the Church to sit on its intelligence till it stopped kicking, from growing up.  Among the things it hadn’t attained to was the easy anthropocentric attitude that is part of our civilisation.