“_Armado_: The naked truth of it is I have no shirt. I go woolward for penance.
_Boyet_: True, and it was enjoined him in Rome for want of linen.”
Or follow a smart officer through the streets to his house. The position and entrance of the house will not prepare you for its decreasing splendour as you climb stair after stair to the bare rooms where he lives. There is much that is _postizo_, false and artificial, in the exterior view, as Spaniards will themselves bitterly confess. Appearances must be maintained. So Bacon says that “It hath been an opinion that the Frenchmen are wiser than they seem and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are,” and many of their houses are built not to live in but to look on. Hence, partly, a disquieting element of mistrust, of “suspicions that ever fly by twilight” foreign to the frank and open nature of true Spaniards. “Of every Spanish undertaking,” writes Señor Benavente in 1909, “it may be said as of the famous _Cortes_ that it is ‘dishonoured while yet unborn.’ The result is that he who is jealous of his good name shuns contact with all business affairs like pitch, and the affairs fall into the hands of men who are untroubled by scruples.... All these suspicions and distrusts are a sign rather of our poverty than of our morality. There is so great a scarcity of money that it becomes unintelligible that any one who has the handling of it should fail to keep a part for himself.... We are, moreover, so firmly attached to old-fashioned ideas of nobility--_rancias hidalguías_--that, in spite of our pressing need of money, we still consider its acquisition contemptible; so we prefer to seek it by subterranean channels as if it were a crime to seek it in the light of day.”