“It is true that I said that. And, after all, if you desire my love, why do you not try to merit it by becoming a Christian and a Catholic. In spite of your wicked atheism I cannot say that I do not love you ... a little. But oh! why are you not like me? Why do you not imitate my piety?”
“Because it is beyond me,” he retorted sarcastically, “because there are forms of piety so unnatural, so insane, so absurd, silly and irrational.... But at least you must admit that it was you, you yourself who desecrated the sacrament.”
“But I,” replied his wife, catching at a cogent argument. “I have been faithful and you have not.”
Leon was staggered for an instant.
“I have been faithful too,” he said. “I swear it before God and by the sacred memory of my father and mother! Faithful, tender and kind to the last extremity—even when you, carried away by a sickly piety, and by the example and ardent warnings of your hapless brother, built up a wall of ice between your soul and mine. You refused to bestow on me even the commonplaces of affection, the gentle words and tones which may take the place of love when love is dead; you humiliated me with your senseless scruples and cruel recriminations, that bore a hideous resemblance to vulgar abuse; you made my home empty and dark, casting a gloom over it that oppressed my heart, dried my brain, and embittered my blood; you took a delight in neglecting your person to the extent even of sluttishness; to annoy me more deeply you dressed in absurd and shapeless clothes, and took a pride in making yourself repulsive and odious. Every word I spoke you regarded as blasphemy, and all my thoughts and feelings were crimes worthy to be punished by the inquisition. You were mad and blind! If you felt called to such a career of sanctity why did you not try to imitate the patience—a saintly patience, surely—with which I endured your proud assumption of humility, your unchristian bitterness, and your devotion, which for insolence, vexatiousness and recalcitrancy was for all the world like the pranks of a troup of demons playing the part of angels with masks on.
“And you come to me—to me who have borne all this—to me whom you have hated and tormented—to me! and call me to account instead of asking my forgiveness. ‘Pardon,’ María is the only word that it becomes you to utter this day! after all your bigotry, and hypocrisy, and insults, you desire me to account to you ... for what? A woman who has told her husband that she does not love him cannot call him to account. I have been more than considerate in not declaring our marriage as void, in still acknowledging you as my wife, in regarding myself as still bound to you by some invisible tie, in asking not for liberty but only for peace—not for compensation but only for respite!”
“You might indeed lodge some complaint against me,” retorted María, “if, since that time, you had been as faithful to me as I have been to you. But you have not; nay you have long, long been false to me.”
“It is not true.”
“Yes, false and faithless,” she insisted, clinging to the statement with feverish vehemence. “And instead of defending yourself you turn upon me! Those are the tactics of every clever criminal.... I was blind, ignorant of your perfidy. You have cheated me shamefully!”
“It is not true.”