Paoletti stood lost in thought.
“There is no fundamental and moral bond between us,” Leon went on. “María and I are two separate souls: in my mind I see her and myself as the very idea incarnate of divorce.”
“Yes—a group of statuary—a work of art!” said Paoletti, a lightning shaft of malice flashing across the dark cloud of his austerity.
“Well, yes—a work of art—which did not originate spontaneously, mark you, but was somebody’s doing, somebody’s work. My wife does not love me. I believe she might have loved me as I hoped, if the grave faults of her character, instead of diminishing and vanishing under my authority and tenderness, had not become more marked under alien influences. She does not love me; I do not love her. Consequently any reconciliation is out of the question.”
“You cannot say,” added the priest, with some severity, tempered however by tolerance, “that I have not listened to you with patience.”
“Patience! I have had much longer patience!”
“Even those who have it least retain with it a touch of the Christian about them, caballero.—Then the long and short of it, Señor de Roch, is that you do not love your wife and she does not love you—you respect and regard her.—But what is the upshot of it all? Or to put it plainly, what did you come here for?”
“María begged me to fetch her confessor. Far from opposing her I consented with pleasure.”
“Then let us go at once!” said Paoletti rising.
“The most important thing is yet to come,” said Leon laying his hand on the priest’s robe. “You, with your perspicacity will at once perceive that I need not have come myself merely to fetch you. I came to tell you what no one else could tell you. Consider in the first place that her mind is the part really affected.”