If the Church belongs to the woman, ruling Spain through her, she has remained outside the exhaustive activities of her husband. The Spanish woman has been untouched by metaphysics: her heroine, Santa Teresa de Jesús, is an ennobled _house-cleaner_, a glorified matron of Christ. The Spaniard’s wife has not, like him, been split into intricate traits of will and of expression: nor in the sequel need she spend herself to win back unity from an inner chaos. She is naturally whole: she is the foe of even the fairest anarchies of the spirit. There is in her an heroic amplitude that recalls the poised women of the Hebrews. She is the savior of Spain, for she is the Responder to Spain’s excesses of action and inaction. The land has become a matriarchy--by default. The Spaniard has been too busy establishing theodicy on earth to rule Spain well: at last too involved in the equating of his embattled impulse to rule Spain at all. Imperceptibly, unofficially, woman has taken hold. She allows man many liberties--trivial liberties of the sort she would call romantic, if she knew the word. He may “govern,” vote, own; he may fight; he may drink, gamble, whore. He may act indeed the perfect child thinking himself the center of the world because of his exultant vices (of which politics and journalism are the most absurd). Meantime, she with her compass Christ, and her wheel, the priest, steers the slow ship of Spain. In her disposal are the education of her children, intellectual and moral, the molding of those customs which go deeper than statute. In her hands is the family, and the family is Spain. She is the true controller of finance. It is a common thing in Spain for the man to own the money of his wife, and for the wife to distribute the money of her husband. In the peasant classes, she is arbiter of culture and thought: in the middle classes she is economic judge: in the noble classes the lineage descends through her in equality with her husband. The nature of Spain calls imperatively for the dominance of woman. Woman’s mind is individualistic, and Spain is a congeries of consonant parts rather than an organism. Woman builds her familial molecule from the Spanish atoms: she erects a great simplicity in which her man can dwell.