“Not a thing. The brains of a Papuan. Morality is found only in superior races. The English say that Wellington is superior to Napoleon because Wellington fought through a sense of duty and Napoleon for glory. The idea of duty never penetrates into craniums like the colonel’s. Talk to a Mandingo of duty. Nothing doing. Oh, anthropology is a most instructive science. I explain everything by anthropological laws.”
They were passing by the Café de Varela.
“Shall we go in here?” asked her cousin.
“Let’s go.”
The three sat down around a table, each asked for a favourite drink and the baroness’s cousin continued his speech.
The man was a queer type; he spoke an almost incomprehensible Andalusian dialect, with a guttural h; he had enough money to subsist upon and with this, and a minor position in a ministry, he managed to get along. He dwelt in a very carefully regulated disorder, reading Spencer in English and changing his mode of life at certain seasons.
Like the whimsical fellow he was, he had been sunk for the past four or five years in the swampy fields of sociology and anthropology. He was convinced that intellectually he was an Anglo-Saxon, who need not be occupied with questions pertaining to Spain or to any other nation of the South.
“Yes, indeed,” continued Horacio as he filled his glass with beer, “I explain everything, down to the tiniest detail, by social or biological laws. This morning, as I was getting up, I heard my landlady conversing with the baker about the rise in the cost of bread. ‘Why has bread gone up?’ she asked him. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘They say that the harvest is good.’ ‘Well, then?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I went off to the office at the precise hour, with English punctuality; there was nobody there; that’s the Spanish custom. So I asked myself, How does it happen that bread goes up if there’s a good harvest? And I hit upon the explanation which I think will convince you. You know that there are tiny cells in the brain.”
“How should I know anything about that?” retorted the baroness, dipping a biscuit into her chocolate.