"And yet," said Cárlos, "I have noticed that she is very intelligent. There is a great deal of acuteness and cleverness under that simple exterior and wild rusticity. No, no, Nela is no fool by a long way. If any one had taken the trouble to teach her anything, she would have learnt it better, perhaps, than most children. Would you believe it? Nela has a great imagination; but lacking, as she does, the most rudimentary knowledge, it has of course, made her sentimental and superstitious."
"In point of fact she is in the condition of all primitive races," said Teodoro. "She is at the pastoral stage of civilization."
"Only yesterday," Cárlos went on, "I was passing by La Trascava and I saw her sitting exactly where we found her again just now. I called her and made her come to me, and I asked her what she was doing there; and with the most perfect simplicity she told me she was talking with her mother.—You know, perhaps, that Nela's mother threw herself into that chasm."
"That is to say that she killed herself," said Sofía. "She was a woman of bad character and worse feeling, from all I have heard of her. Cárlos was not living here then, but they say she drank like a stoker. And I ask you: Do these vile creatures, who end a life of sin by committing the greatest crime of all—Suicide—deserve any pity from the human race? There are things too horrible to contemplate—wretches that ought never to have been born. Teodoro may argue as much as he likes, but I cannot help asking you...."
"Ask nothing, my dear sister," said Teodoro warmly. "For I could only reply that the suicide deserves our deepest and fullest pity. So far as abuse goes, heap it on her by all means, and as much as you please; but at the same time it might be as well to enquire what were the causes that brought her to such a fearful extremity of desperation—and I may add that if society had not wholly abandoned her and left her no way out but the yawning door of that hideous abyss which seemed to invite her...."
"Abandoned by society! Well, some must be ..." said Sofía flippantly. "Society cannot take care of every one. Look at the statistics of population—only look, and you will see how many poor there are to provide for. Besides, supposing society does overlook some—what is religion for?"
"I am speaking of those poor wretches who add to all their other miseries, ignorance, which is the greatest of all. An ignorant soul, debased and superstitious, has none but the vaguest and absurdest ideas of God. The sense of something Great and Unknown, instead of withholding him, impels him to crime. It is rarely indeed that the thought of religion is of any good to those who vegetate in stolid ignorance. No intelligent friend ever goes near them, neither master nor priest; the only superior they ever come into contact with, is the judge who tries them.
"It is strange to see how inexorably you condemn what, after all, is your own work!" he went on, twisting the stick on which his hat was still mounted. "You stand looking straight before you, seeing at the very threshold of your own comfortable homes a crowd of neglected creatures, deprived of everything that childhood needs, from parents to playthings—you see them, I say, without its ever occurring to you to raise them an inch in the world, by telling them that they too are human beings, and giving them some of the ideas they so deplorably lack, without ever dreaming of ennobling them by lifting them out of their brutalizing, mechanical toil, to some intelligent work; you see them dwelling in filthy hovels, ill-fed, sinking lower day by day in their savage squalor, and it never occurs to you to spare for them a little of the comfort and luxury that surround you! You save all your energies to declaim against murder, robbery and suicide, without ever reflecting that you are, in fact, keeping open school for these three crimes."
"You seem to forget that there are houses of refuge, hospitals, asylums ..." said Sofía tartly. "Read statistics, Teodoro, and you will see the number of miserable creatures.... Read statistics."
"I do not read statistics, my dear sister, and your statistics count for nothing with me. Asylums are good—not that they can ever solve the great problem of orphanage. A hapless orphan, dropped in the streets or in the fields, bereft of all personal affection, and cared for only by a town council—rarely, indeed, is the vacuum filled which yawns in his soul for the love of a parent—not to speak of the vacuum where self-respect, honor, and responsibility ought to be, and so rarely are found. And on that point I have an idea of my own—but, perhaps, it will appear to you absurd...."