“Well, many a girl has done the same, though not with such fatal consequences. I married, and every conceivable misfortune fell upon me and mine ... I was free—but you were as far off as ever. Your very virtue enraged me, though it gave me much to think of. Would you believe that I was quite humiliated by it, and at times flattered my fancy by dreams of being virtuous too? God knows what the end might have been! He saved me by giving me my child. Her birth brought an interval of peace which till then I had not known; as Monina grew under my eyes I seemed to become miraculously gifted with intelligence, prudence, a love of order, and common-sense. I was a different creature, I became what I should have been if, instead of the torments of rejected love, I had lived in peace under the yoke of your authority.
“Now I am cured of those vagaries which made me notorious; I am not as good as I ought to be; I do not fear God as I ought; I cannot feel ready to sacrifice my feelings to the laws to which I have been a martyr; I see now that I have been living in a world of empty dogmas, where fine words are more plentiful than good deeds, and so I say: ‘I am free, you are free....’”
“I?”
“Yes, you. For a man is free who breaks his chains. Did you not say that she had left you?”
“Yes!” A pained and doubting expression came over Leon’s features.
“No! I see that it is I—always I—who am really abandoned!” cried Pepa. “Well, so be it!”
“Abandoned, no. But there is a moral impossibility which neither you nor I can fail to see. As for me, I am in the most desperate and wretched dilemma that any man ever had to face.”
Pepa looked straight into his eyes in agonised expectation of what he might say next.
“I am married; I do not love my wife, nor does she love me. We are incompatible natures; there is a gulf between us. We are separated by utter antipathy, as strong in her as in me. But why did my wife become alienated from me? She was faithful and virtuous, she brought no dishonour on my name—if she had I would have killed her! As it is I cannot kill her—nor divorce her; even a legal separation is out of the question. The only crime that has come between us is religion. Of what do I accuse her? Of being a bigot, a fanatic. And is that a fault?... Who can decide? Now and then with shameful sophistry it has occurred to me that I might accuse her of insanity; horrible thought! And what right have I to call any excess of pious practices insane? God alone can read hearts and determine the boundary line between piety and fanaticism. In my own soul I can declare that my wife is a fanatic; but I have no right to accuse her before all the world.”