spaces, the massive gold of the altar-pieces, and the sumptuous iron-work, gilt and faded, the air laden with incense, the silence:  Philip almost saw the Canons in their short surplices of lawn, the acolytes in red, passing from the sacristy to the choir; he almost heard the monotonous chanting of vespers.  The names which Athelny mentioned, Avila, Tarragona, Saragossa, Segovia, Cordova, were like trumpets in his heart.  He seemed to see the great gray piles of granite set in old Spanish towns amid a landscape tawny, wild, and windswept.

“I’ve always thought I should love to go to Seville,” he said casually, when Athelny, with one hand dramatically uplifted, paused for a moment.

“Seville!” cried Athelny.  “No, no, don’t go there.  Seville:  it brings to the mind girls dancing with castanets, singing in gardens by the Guadalquivir, bull-fights, orange-blossom, mantillas, mantones de Manila.  It is the Spain of comic opera and Montmartre.  Its facile charm can offer permanent entertainment only to an intelligence which is superficial.  Theophile Gautier got out of Seville all that it has to offer.  We who come after him can only repeat his sensations.  He put large fat hands on the obvious and there is nothing but the obvious there; and it is all finger-marked and frayed.  Murillo is its painter.”

Athelny got up from his chair, walked over to the Spanish cabinet, let down the front with its great gilt hinges and gorgeous lock, and displayed a series of little drawers.  He took out a bundle of photographs.

“Do you know El Greco?” he asked.

“Oh, I remember one of the men in Paris was awfully impressed by him.”

“El Greco was the painter of Toledo.  Betty couldn’t find the photograph I wanted to show you.  It’s a picture that El Greco painted of the city he loved, and it’s truer than any photograph.  Come and sit at the table.”

Philip dragged his chair forward, and Athelny set the photograph before him.  He looked at it curiously, for a long time, in silence.  He stretched out his hand for other photographs, and Athelny passed them to him.  He had never before seen the work of that enigmatic master; and at the first glance he was bothered by the arbitrary drawing:  the figures were extraordinarily elongated; the heads were very small; the attitudes were extravagant.  This was not realism, and yet, and yet even in the photographs you had the impression of a troubling reality.  Athelny was describing eagerly, with vivid phrases, but Philip only heard vaguely what he said.  He was puzzled.  He was curiously moved.  These pictures seemed to offer some meaning to him, but he did not know what the meaning was.  There were portraits of men with large, melancholy eyes which seemed to say you knew not what; there were long monks in the Franciscan habit or in the Dominican, with distraught faces, making gestures whose sense escaped you; there was an Assumption of the Virgin; there