“Leave me—pray leave me,” Leon would say, tortured by regret. “Go and pray God for me.”
“But without you half of myself is wanting; I cannot feel as though I were good throughout, as I want to be.”
Then she would fly to him, clasp him in her arms and rest her head against the weary man’s breast, saying, with a sort of sob: “I love you so much!”
Leon’s persistent refusal to take any part in her pious practices brought them at length to that chronic state of misunderstanding, or rather of moral divorce, in which we have seen them two years after their marriage. They had ceased to share their ideas or to consult each other on any opinion or plan; they never enjoyed that community of pleasures or of trouble which is the natural marriage of souls; they neither wept together nor rejoiced together—they did not even quarrel. They were like those stars which look as if they were but one, and which in reality are millions of miles apart. All their friends could see that Leon was wretched, and suffering deeply though in silence.
“He has set his heart on making his wife a rationalist,” they said, “and that is as absurd as a sanctimonious man would be.”
“That is just what I say,” another would reply, “belief and disbelief are a matter of sex.”
“The fact is that he is desperately in love with her.”
And this was the truth. Leon was bewitched by the beauty of his wife, who every day seemed more lovely and who, without interfering with her pious exercises, had the art of enhancing it by the luxury and taste of her dress and the perfect care of her person. It was equally true of María: she too was desperately in love; for no earthly consideration would she have changed the husband with whom fate and the church had blest her. The void in her heart had been filled by a perfectly unspiritual passion for his extraordinarily handsome person. Nor was he indifferent to the homage paid by the multitude to the lord and master of a gracious and beautiful wife—on the contrary, he was extremely proud of it, and the thought that María could under any conceivable circumstances have belonged to any other man, even in thought or intention, maddened him with rage. In short, they were two divorced beings, so far as mind and feeling were concerned, though united by the power of beauty, on the stormy territory of imagination.
It was of this that Leon was meditating at this hour of the night. At last he came to this bitter reflection: