“No, I certainly did not.”
“You thought you were free! poor man ... free to pursue ... without a road ... free, I mean, to pursue the road of infamy without let or hindrance. No, no! you must account to ... to me....”
All the speeches that María had in fancy delivered with so much unction had evaporated, word by word. She made a desperate effort to remember a single effective phrase; in vain! they were gone. She could hardly catch at a word as they whirled through her brain, and she could only cry out in a husky voice:
“Guilty wretch!”
Leon smiled slightly and María went on: “Wretch! I am here to apprehend you.”
“Very well,” said Leon calmly accepting the idea. “But allowing that I am guilty, and a wretch, and that you are the police—you have no chain to fetter me with because you yourself have broken it.”
María had prepared her rejoinders on the supposition that her husband would answer her as she had imagined; but as Leon said something quite different she was in the position of an actor who has lost his cues.
“The chain,” she murmured, not at the instant understanding what he meant, “and I, you say, have broken it.”
“Yes, you. Who but you gave me my liberty?”
“You are a wretch, a libertine, a villain!” cried María dropping into the vulgar recrimination of every angry wife. “Liberty? What do you mean by it? You have none. You are my husband—tied to me by a bond that none but God can sever, since it was He who bound us. You abominable materialists think that the ordinance of matrimony is a thing to be played fast and loose with. I tell you it is a divine institution.”