"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 were the
horses; he shuddered at his unspoken memory of a horse stumbling from
the arena at Seville with a riven belly and hanging entrails that
gleamed like mother-o'-pearl. Oh, yes, he admitted, it was cruel; or,
rather, would be if it were committed by a people like ourselves. But it
wasn't. That was the point he wanted to make. When one travelled far
back in time. It was hard for us--"for you, especially," he amplified,
with a courteous, enthusiastic flinging out of his hand, "with your
unparalleled Scotch system of education"--to comprehend the mentality of
a people which had been prevented, by the economic insanity of its
governors and the determination of the Church to sit on its intelligence
till it stopped kicking, from growing up. Among the things it hadn't
attained to was the easy anthropocentric attitude that is part of our
civilisation.

Ellen thought him very wonderful, as he stood theorising about the
experiences he had described, like a lecturer in front of his
magic-lantern pictures; for he was wholly given up to speculation and
yet was as substantial as any man of action.

Panic, he invited them to consider, was the habitual state of mind of
primitive peoples, the flood that submerged all but the strongest
swimmers. The savage spent his days suspecting and exorcising evil. The
echo in the cliff is an enemy, the wind in the grass an approaching
sickness, the new-born child clad in mystery and defilement. But it