had seen, with comparative indifference, five bulls and many more
horses killed. The sense that this was the last survival of all the glories
of the amphitheater, the illusion that the riders on the caparisoned
horses might have been knights of a tournament, or the matadore a
slightly armed gladiator facing his martyrdom, and all the rest of the
obscure yet vivid associations of an historic survival, had carried me
beyond the endurance of any of the rest of the party. I finally met them
in the foyer, stern and pale with disapproval of my brutal endurance,
and but partially recovered from the faintness and disgust which the
spectacle itself had produced upon them. I had no defense to offer to
their reproaches save that I had not thought much about the bloodshed; but in the evening the natural and inevitable reaction came, and
in deep chagrin I felt myself tried and condemned, not only by this
disgusting experience but by the entire moral situation which it revealed. It was suddenly made quite clear to me that I was lulling my
conscience by a dreamer's scheme, that a mere paper reform had become a defense for continued idleness, and that I was making it a raison d'etre for going on indefinitely with study and travel. It is easy to
become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can
never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in
making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things
to come. Nothing less than the moral reaction following the experience at a bull-fight had been able to reveal to me that so far from following in the wake of a chariot of philanthropic fire, I had been tied to
the tail of the veriest ox-cart of self-seeking.
I had made up my mind that next day, whatever happened, I would
begin to carry out the plan, if only by talking about it. I can well recall
the stumbling and uncertainty with which I finally set it forth to Miss
Starr, my old-time school friend, who was one of our party. I even
dared to hope that she might join in carrying out the plan, but nevertheless I told it in the fear of that disheartening experience which is so
apt to afflict our most cherished plans when they are at last divulged,
when we suddenly feel that there is nothing there to talk about, and as
the golden dream slips through our fingers we are left to wonder at our
own fatuous belief. But gradually the comfort of Miss Starr's companionship, the vigor and enthusiasm which she brought to bear upon it,
told both in the growth of the plan and upon the sense of its validity,
so that by the time we had reached the enchantment of the Alhambra,