"That's all very fine," said Mr. Philip, "but they've had time to get
over their little fancies. We're in the twentieth century now."

Ah, the conception might never emerge into their consciousness, and
perhaps they would laugh at it if it did; but for all that it lies sunk
in their minds and shapes their mental contour. When a dead city is
buried by earth and no new city is built on its site the peasants tread
out their paths on the terraces which show where the old streets ran.
Something like that happened to a nation. Modern Spaniards hadn't,
thanks to taxation and the Church, been able to build a mental life for
themselves; so, since the mind of man must have a little exercise, they
repeated imitatively the actions by which their forefathers had
responded to their quite real psychological imperatives. You couldn't
perhaps find in the whole of the Peninsula a man or woman who felt this
fear of the beast, but that didn't affect his case. It was enough that
all men and women in the Peninsula had once felt it and had formed a
national habit of attending bullfights, and as silly subalterns
sometimes lay the toe of their boots to a Hindu for the glory of the
British Empire--keeping the animal creation in its place by kicks and
blows to mules and dogs.

It was incredible, he exclaimed, the interweaving of the old and the new
that made up the fabric of life in Spain. He could give them another
illustration of that. He had lodged for three weeks in Seville, in a
flat at the Cathedral end of the Canovas de Castillo--"that's a street,"
he interjected towards Ellen, "called after a statesman they
assassinated, they don't quite know why." In the flat there lodged a
priest, the usual drunken Spanish priest; and very early every morning,
as the people first began to sing in the streets, a man drove up in an