ptive life, and longs to compete with other countries in their love
for the commonplace and well-regulated and in their abhorrence for
individuality.

In Spain, where the individual and only the individual was everything,
the collectivist aspirations of other peoples are now accepted as
indisputable dogmas. Today our country begins to offer a brilliant
future to the man who can cry up general ideas and sentiments, even
though these ideas and sentiments are at war with the genius of our
race.

It would certainly be a lamentable joke to protest against the
democratic-bourgeois tendency of the day: what is is, because it must be
and because its determined moment has come; and to rebel against facts
is, beyond dispute, childish.

I merely mention these characteristics of the actual epoch; and I point
them out to legitimatize this prologue I have written, which, for what I
know, may after all give more clearness, or may give more obscurity to
my book.... BROTHER AND SISTER

Many years ago I was stationed as doctor in a tiny Basque town, in
Cestona. Sometimes, in summer, while going on my rounds among the
villages I used to meet on the highway and on the cross-roads passersby
of a miserable aspect, persons with liver-complaint who were taking the
waters at the neighbouring cure.

These people, with their leather-coloured skin, did not arouse any
curiosity or interest in me. The middle-class merchant or clerk from the
big towns is repugnant to me, whether well or ill. I would exchange a
curt salute with those liverish parties and go my way on my old nag.

One afternoon I was sitting in a wild part of the mountain, among big
birch-trees, when a pair of strangers approached the spot where I
was. They were not of the jaundiced and disagreeable type of the
valetudinarians. He was a lanky young man, smooth-shaven, grave, and
melancholy; she, a blond woman, most beautiful.

She was dressed in white and wore a straw hat with large flowers; she
had a refined and gracious manner, eyes of blue, a very dark blue, and
flame-coloured hair.

I surmised that they were a young married couple; but he seemed too
indifferent to be the husband of so pretty a woman. In any event, they
were not recently wed.

He bowed to me, and then said to his companion:

"Shall we sit down here?"

"Very well."

They seated themselves on the half-rotten trunk of a tree.

"Are you on a trip?" he asked me, noticing my horse fastened to a
branch.