r incorrect description which only the phenomenal intelligence
of one's listener has enabled him to penetrate, but he set himself
suavely enough to describe the instability of Spanish labour, its
disposition to call strikes that were really larks, and the greater
willingness with which it keeps its saints' days rather than the
commandments; the feckless incapacity of the Spanish to exploit their
own minerals and the evangelic part played in the shameful shoes by
Scotch engineers; and the depleted state of the country in general,
which he was careful to ascribe not so much to the presence of
Catholicism as to the absence of Presbyterianism. And he advised Mr.
Philip that while a sojourn in the towns would reveal these sad
political conditions, there were other deplorable aspects of the
national decay which could only be witnessed if he took a few rides over
the countryside. ("A horse or a bicycle?" asked Mr. Philip doubtfully.)
Then he would have a pleasant holiday. The language presented few
difficulties, although travelling off the tracks in Andalusia was
sometimes impeded by the linguistic ingenuity of the peasants, who,
though they didn't neigh and whinny like the Castilians, went one better
by omitting the consonants. Why, there was a place which spelt itself
Algodonales on the map and calls itself Aooae.

He watched her under his lids as she silently tried it over.

It was a village of no importance, save for the road that close by
forded the Guadalete, which was a pale icy mountain stream, snow-broth,
as Shakespeare said. (Now what had he said to excite her so? Modesty and
a sense of office discipline were restraining some eager cry of her
mind, like white hands holding birds resolved on flight.) One passed
through it on a ride that Mr. Philip must certainly take when he went to
Spain. Yaverland himself had done it last February. He receded into a
dream of that springtime, yet kept his consciousness of the girl's rapt
attention, as one may clasp the warm hand of a friend while one thinks
deeply, and he sent his voice out to Mr. Philip as into a void,
describing how he had gone to Seville one saint's day and how the narrow
decaying streets, choked with loveliness like stagnant ditches filled
with a fair weed, had entertained him. For a time he had sat in the
Moorish courts of the Alcazar; he had visited the House of Pontius
Pilate and had watched through the carven windows the two stone women
that pray for ever am