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, for you; the censer
swings and smokes for you; the little wicked-eyed choir-boys and
mischievous-looking acolytes suppress their natures in your behalf as
much as if you were a believer, or perhaps more. The whole unstinted
hospitality of the service is there for you, as well as for the children
of the house, and the heart must be rude and the soul ungrateful that
would refuse it. For my part, I accepted it as far as I knew how, and
when I left the worshipers on their knees and went tiptoeing from
picture to picture and chapel to chapel, it was with shame for the
unscrupulous sacristan showing me about, and I felt that he, if not I,
ought to be put out and not allowed back till the function was over.
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