“For a long time, for years.”
“Not true.”
“But at last it has all come to my knowledge. I have discovered the whole truth. You cannot deny it, for the present throws light on the past and your crime of to-day betrays that of yesterday. You have lost all decency; you do not even hide the distant date of your intimacy—and here, in this house, where you have buried yourself to revel in your sin, you pass whole days playing with that child ... with that sniffling little brat!...”
Leon glared at his wife with a terrible expression; his eyes darted arrows of wrath. María drew a deep breath and added in a hoarse voice: “With her child—which is yours.”
With livid lips and a murderous glare in his eyes, looking as an assassin may in the very act, Leon went up to his wife and seizing her by the arm he shook her in his fury:
“It is a calumny,” he said, “a lie....”
Then he let her go, swallowing down the rest of the words that were on his tongue.
María stung and devoured by all the serpents of jealousy, had no words for the rage that burned within her; for when jealousy has reached a certain pitch it cannot find utterance—it must act. Her revenge could not be satisfied with anything less than the destruction of the innocent cause of her indignation. To tear Monina limb from limb was what her passion prompted her to do, and without a moment’s hesitation she acted on the impulse; she snatched up the doll that Monina had left on a chair and tore it to pieces—arms, legs, hair—the trembling hands of the outraged wife wreaked her vengeance on the senseless toy. Then, flinging the fragments away, she exclaimed in broken gasps:
“There ... that ... that is how your lawful wife ought to treat her ... her....” She was almost choking.