“Then my husband—then you mean to say—he believes in nothing—there is no hope for his soul—he is an atheist, an infidel ... but he is perfectly well conducted and blameless in his life....”
Pilar suddenly burst out laughing; her loud and impertinent mirth, lasting for some seconds, disturbed María beyond measure.
“If you call it blameless to desert his wife, who is a saint, and live with another ...” said her friend, in a sharp rough tone like that of a file on metal. María turned as pale as death, her eyes staring and her lips parted.
“With another!” The idea was not a new one, but the fact was a shock. She had anticipated the revelation by vague and timid suspicions; but a sad truth startles us even when it has been foreseen in a terrible dream. “With another, you said?”
“Yes, with another. All Madrid knows it but you.”
“You said—with another ...” repeated María who had half lost her wits and stood stunned and paralysed as though those two terrible words were a mass of stone that had fallen on her head.
“Yes, with another,” said Pilar, with another burst of laughter, which did not argue any very great reverence for the saint of her adoration.
“And who is it?” asked María with a flash of vehemence, her bewilderment suddenly changed to passionate excitement. “Who, I say, who?”
“I thought you knew, poor martyr! It is Pepa Fúcar, the daughter of the Marquis de Fúcar; the man whom all the papers call ‘the eminent Fúcar,’ because he has made a fortune by paving streets, laying down railroads, poisoning the country with his tobacco—which is made they say of dead leaves swept off the roads, and finally lending money to the government during the war, at two hundred per cent; a specimen man of the century, with a Haytian title; a product of parliamentary influence and work done by contract. He cannot bear the sight of me because, one evening at the Rioponces’, he began paying me compliments and I turned my back on him, and whenever I see him within hearing in a drawing-room I begin talking of the adulteration of tobacco, of the increase of asphalt pavements, of the nuisance of gas, and of the shoes with brown paper soles that he supplied to the troops.” And Pilar laughed sharply for the third time.