where none
should pry, go begging with his sores, trade his own soul for his
mother's. His pride becomes insolence, his tragedy hideous revolt, his
impassivity swinish, his rock of sufficiency a rook of offence. God in
His mercy, or the Devil in his despite, made the cities of Spain.

And yet the man, so superbly at his ease in his enormous spaces, is his
own conclusion when he goes to town; the permutation is logical. He is
too strong a thing to break his nature; it will be aggravated but not
deflected. Leave him to swarm in the _plaza_ and seek his nobler
brother. Go out by the gate, descend the winding suburb, which gives
you the burnt plains and far blue hills, now on one hand, now on the
other, as you circle down and down, with the walls mounting as you
fall; touch once more the dusty earth, traverse the deep shade of the
ilex-avenue; greet the ox-teams, the filing mules, as they creep up the
hill to the town: you are bound for their true, great Spain. And
though it may be ten days since you saw it, or fifty years, you will
find nothing altered. The Spaniard is still the flower of his rocks.
_O dura tellus Iberiae_!

From the window of his garret Don Luis Ramonez de Alavia could overlook
the town wall, and by craning his neck out sideways could have seen, if
he had a mind, the cornice-angle of the palace of his race. It was a
barrack in these days, and had been so since ruin had settled down on
the Ramonez with the rest of Valladolid. That had been in the
sixteenth century, but no Ramonez had made any effort to repair it.
Every one of them did as Don Luis was doing now, and accepted misery in
true Spanish fashion. Not only did he never speak of it, he never
thought of it either. It was; therefore it had to be.

He rose at dawn, every day of his life, and took his sop in coffee in
his bedgown, sitting on the edge of his bed. He heard mass in the
Church of Las Angustias, in the same chapel at the same hour. Once a
month he communicated, and then the sop was omitted. He was shaved in
the barber's shop--Gomez the Sevillian kept it--at the corner of the
_plaza_. Gomez, the little dapper, black-eyed man, was a friend of
his, his newspaper and his doctor.

He took a high line with Gomez, as you may when you owe a man twopence
a week.

That over, he took the sun in the _plaza_, up and down the centre line
of flags in fine weather, up and down the arcade if it rained. He saw
the _diligence_ from Madr