cause he
had escaped to it from the conventionality which during his married life
he had found so irksome. With large gestures and in the emphatic tone
which made what he said so striking, Athelny described to Philip the
Spanish cathedrals with their vast dark 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 figure