ides of Christ. Dismal night,
forerunner of a hundred such. "Oh, God, what is the use of it all? I sit
here yarning to this damned little dwarf of a solicitor and this girl
who is sick to go to these countries from which I've come back cold and
famined...."

But he went on, since the occasion seemed to demand it, giving a gay
account of the beauty which he remembered so intensely because it had
framed his agony; how the next day, under a sky that was temporarily
pale and amiable because this was early spring, he had ridden down the
long road between the brown heathy pastures to the blue barren downland
that lies under the black mountains, and had come at last to a winding
path that led not only through space but through time, for it ran nimbly
in and out among the seasons. It travelled under the rosy eaves of a
forest of blossoming almond up to a steep as haggard with weather as a
Scotch moor, and dipped again to hedges of aloes and cactus and
asphodel. At one moment a spindrift of orange blossom blew about him; at
another he had watched the peasants in their brown capes stripping their
dark green orange-groves and piling the golden globes into the panniers
of donkeys which were gay with magenta tassels. At one time there was
trouble getting the horse up the icy trail, yet a little later it was
treading down the irises and jonquils and bending its head to snuff the
rosemary. So on, beauty all the way, and infinitely variable, all the
many days' journey to the coast, where the mountain drops suddenly to
the surf and reflects the Mediterranean sky as a purple glamour on its
snowy crest. Ah, such a country!

He meant to go at that, for his listeners were now like honey-drugged
bees: to toss his papers on the table, go out, and let the situation
settle itself after his departure. But Mr. Philip said, "But surely
they're crool. Bullfights and that--"

He could not let that pass. "You don't understand. It's different over
there."

"Surely right's right and wrong's wrong, wherever you are?" said Mr.
Philip.

"No. Spain's a place, as I said, where one travels in time as well as in
space...." He didn't himself agree that the bullfight was so much
crueller than most organised activities of men. From the bull's point of
view, indeed, it was a nobler way of becoming roast beef than any other
and gave him the chance of drawing blood for blood; and the toreador's
life was good, as all dangerous lives are. But of course there we