Ah, the conception might never emerge into their consciousness, and perhaps they would laugh at it if it did; but for all that it lies sunk in their minds and shapes their mental contour.  When a dead city is buried by earth and no new city is built on its site the peasants tread out their paths on the terraces which show where the old streets ran.  Something like that happened to a nation.  Modern Spaniards hadn’t, thanks to taxation and the Church, been able to build a mental life for themselves; so, since the mind of man must have a little exercise, they repeated imitatively the actions by which their forefathers had responded to their quite real psychological imperatives.  You couldn’t perhaps find in the whole of the Peninsula a man or woman who felt this fear of the beast, but that didn’t affect his case.  It was enough that all men and women in the Peninsula had once felt it and had formed a national habit of attending bullfights, and as silly subalterns sometimes lay the toe of their boots to a Hindu for the glory of the British Empire—­keeping the animal creation in its place by kicks and blows to mules and dogs.

It was incredible, he exclaimed, the interweaving of the old and the new that made up the fabric of life in Spain.  He could give them another illustration of that.  He had lodged for three weeks in Seville, in a flat at the Cathedral end of the Canovas de Castillo—­“that’s a street,” he interjected towards Ellen, “called after a statesman they assassinated, they don’t quite know why.”  In the flat there lodged a priest, the usual drunken Spanish priest; and very early every morning, as the people first began to sing in the streets, a man drove up in an automobile and took him away for an hour.  Presently he was told the story of this morning visitor by several people in the house, and he had listened to it as one didn’t often listen to twice-told tales, for it was amazing to observe how each of the tellers, whether it was tipsy Fra Jeronimo or the triple-chinned landlady, Donna Gloria, or Pepe, the Atheist medical student who kept his skeletons in the washhouse on the roof, accepted it as a quite commonplace episode.  The man in the automobile had lost his wife.  He minded quite a lot, perhaps because he had gone through a good deal to get her.  When he first met her she was another man’s wife.  He said nothing to her then, but presently the way that he stared at her at the bullfight and the opera and waited in the Paseo de la Delicias for her carriage to come by made Seville talk, and her husband called him out.  The duel was fought on some sandy flat down by the river, and the husband was killed.  It was given out that he had been gored by a bull, and within a year the widow married the man who had killed him.  In another year she was dead of fever.  Her husband gave great sums for Masses for her soul and to charity, and shut up the house where they had entertained Seville with the infantile, interminable gaieties that are loved by the South, and went abroad.