“Yes! I’m afraid so. Both my husbands—even Joachim—they seemed, somehow, so obstinate in their little stupidities—rather like monkeys. I felt a terrible revulsion from Joachim when he was dead. I thought: What peaked monkey is that, that I have been losing my blood about.—Do you think it’s rather awful?”
“I do! But then I think we all feel like that, at moments. Or we would if we dared. It’s only one of our moments.”
“Sometimes,” said she, “I think that is my permanent feeling towards people. I like the world, the sky and the earth and the greater mystery beyond. But people—yes, they are all monkeys to me.”
He could see that, at the bottom of her soul, it was true.
“Puras monas!” he said to himself in Spanish. “Y lo que hacen, puras monerias.”
“Pure monkeys! And the things they do, sheer monkeydom!” Then he added: “Yet you have children!”
“Yes! Yes!” she said, struggling with herself. “My first husband’s children.”
“And they?—monas y no mas?”
“No!” she said, frowning and looking angry with herself. “Only partly.”
“It is bad,” he said, shaking his head. “But then!” he added.—“What are my own children to me, but little monkeys? And their mother—and their mother—Ah, no! Señora Caterina! It is no good. One must be able to disentangle oneself from persons, from people. If I go to a rose-bush, to be intimate with it, it is a nasty thing that hurts me. One must disentangle oneself from persons and personalities, and see people as one sees the trees in the landscape. People in some way dominate you. In some way, humanity dominates your consciousness. So you must hate people and humanity, and you want to escape. But there is only one way of escape: to turn beyond them, to the greater life.”