of scorn. If she is a young girl she may wear colors
with it (a cheerful blue seems the favorite), but by far the greater
number came to the cathedral in complete black. Those somber figures
which clustered before chapel, or singly dotted the pavement everywhere,
flitted in and out like shadows in the perpetual twilight. For far the
greater number, their coming to the church was almost their sole escape
into the world. They sometimes met friends, and after a moment, or an
hour, of prayer they could cheer their hearts with neighborly gossip.
But for the greater part they appeared and disappeared silently and
swiftly, and left the spectator to helpless conjecture of their history.
Many of them would have first met their husbands in the cathedral when
they prayed, or when they began to look around to see who was looking
at them. It might have been their trysting-place, safeguarding them in
their lovers' meetings, and after marriage it had become their social
world, when their husbands left them for the clubs or the cafes. They
could not go at night, of course, except to some special function, but
they could come by day as often as they liked. I do not suppose that
the worshipers I saw habitually united love or friendship with their
devotions in the cathedral, but some certainly joined business with
devotion; at a high function one day an American girl felt herself
sharply nudged in the side, and when she turned she found the palm of
her kneeling neighbor stretched toward her. They must all have had their
parish churches besides the cathedral, and a devotee might make the day
a social whirl by visiting one shrine after another. But I do not
think that many do. The Spanish women are of a domestic genus, and are
expected to keep at home by the men who expect to keep abroad.

I do not know just how it is in the parish churches; they must each
have its special rite, which draws and holds the frequenter; but
the cathedral constantly offers a drama of irresistible appeal.
We non-Catholics can feel this even at the distance to which our
Protestantism has remanded us, and at your first visit to the Seville
cathedral during mass you cannot help a moment of recreant regret when
you wish that a part in the mystery enacting was your birthright. The
esthetic emotion is not denied you; the organ-tide that floods the place
bears you on it, too; the priests perform their rites before the altar
for you; they come and go, they bow and kneel,