were saying yesterday." When after five years' absence he found himself once more in the chair in that same cavernous class room, without troubling to allude to the interruption he began: "We were saying yesterday . . ."
I was with the usual party of casual tourists that is herded round such places by the porter. They were nondescript Spanish bourgeois—for the Spaniards take a pride in seeing their own country—and wandered round with the usual expression of boredom which they were carefully repressing from consciousness, but among them was a young man who had the unmistakable look of understanding what he saw. I was intrigued and guessed at his nationality and business. French I decided, that look being less unusual on French faces than on any others, but presently he spoke to the porter in such fluent Spanish that I decided against it knowing how unwillingly the French learn any language but their own. He must, I decided, be a Spanish intellectal and I was the more intrigued. It would be so interesting to know the characteristics of that variety of the species. I saw at once that he had recognized me as clearly as I had him and faint telegraphic messages passed between us as we were jostled with the herd from lecture room to chapel, and from chapel to library, but I was far too much ashamed of my Spanish to make a move, besides I foresaw that we should meet again. And naturally we did so one evening at a café, and inevitably drifted into conversation, for I had been wrong about his Spanish—of course he was a Frenchman and an Ecole-normalien at that, and therefore could learn anything. He was learned as only a Frenchman can be about Spanish architecture. I mean that his knowledge was both wide in range and precise in detail and yet it had not submerged his sensibility. His researches had led him to a state of extreme scepticism about almost all the accepted dates of early Spanish architecture. He would have none of Wamba's Visigothic walls at Toledo: Mudéjar might be of almost any date; and in general he took from me the few pegs on which I had provisionally hung my vague map of the developments of early Spanish art. I passed a delightful evening unlearning the little I thought I knew, and we parted, for he was off to Plasencia early the next morning and wanted me to go with him, but I had already become enamoured of Ciudad Rodrigo on the strength of vague reports, and it was impossible to combine the two.
