Though this was only a joke, he felt sore and nettled, and said sulkily: “What’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”
“You lie, Guy, you lie! You have heard of the _Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_, and you have heard of _If Winter Comes_; because from what you tell me of your parents they probably talk of both incessantly, and....”
“You’re quite right, as a matter of fact,” laughed Guy, delighted that she should remember what he had told her about the manners and customs of his parents, “they talked of nothing else at one time. It made them feel that at last they were able to understand and sympathise with what my generation was after. My father began one night at dinner, ‘Very interesting book that, Guy, _If Winter Comes_—very well written book, very clever; curious book—painful though, painful!’ And my mother tried to discuss some one called Mabel’s character with me. It was no good my saying I hadn’t read it—it only made them despise me and think I wasn’t _dans le mouvement_, after all.”
“There, you see!” laughed Teresa; “Well, what _are_ you reading in Spanish?”
“Calderon’s _Autos_,” and then he launched into one of his excited breathless disquisitions: “As a matter of fact, I was rather disappointed at first. I knew, of course, that they were written in glorification of the Eucharist and that they were bound to be symbolic, and ‘flowery and starry,’ and all the rest of it—man very tiny in comparison with the sun and the moon and the stars and the Cross—but the unregenerate part of me—I suppose it’s some old childhood’s complex—has a secret craving for _genre_. Every fairy story I read when I was a child was a disappointment till I came upon Morris’s _Prose Romances_, and then at last I found three dimensional knights and princesses, and a whole fairy countryside where things went on happening even when Morris and I weren’t looking at them: cows being milked, horses being shod, lovers wandering in lanes; and one knew every hill and every tree, and could take the short cut from one village to another in the dark. And I’d hoped, secretly, that the _autos_ were going to be a little bit like that ... that the characters would be at once abstractions—Grace, the Mosaic Law, and so on—_and_ at the same time real seventeenth century Spaniards, as solid as Sancho Panza, gossiping in taverns, and smelling of dung and garlic. But, of course, I came to see that the real thing was infinitely finer—the plays of a theologian, a priest who had listened in the confessional to disembodied voices whispering their sins, and who kept, like a bird in a cage, a poet’s soul among the scholastic traditions of his intellect, so that gothic decorations flower all round the figure of Theology, as in some Spanish Cathedral ...” he paused to take breath, and then added: “I say—I thought you wouldn’t mind—but I’ve brought you for Christmas an edition of the _Autos_—I think you’ll like them.”