“And Love remade me virgin.”
That line seems like a reminiscence of a tragedy of Corneille, so truly does it recall the energetic diction of the father of our modern theatre. Yet the poet was forced to sacrifice it to the essentially vaudevillist spirit of the pit.
So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded, hopeless. She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in all the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart’s legality, which women apply instinctively to all their feelings, even the least reflective. Juana became profoundly sad as she saw the nature and the extent of the life before her. Often she turned her eyes, brimming with tears proudly repressed, upon Perez and Dona Lagounia, who fully comprehended, both of them, the bitter thoughts those tears contained. But they were silent: of what good were reproaches now; why look for consolations? The deeper they were, the more they enlarged the wound.
One evening, Juana, stupid with grief, heard through the open door of her little room, which the old couple had thought shut, a pitying moan from her adopted mother.
“The child will die of grief.”
“Yes,” said Perez, in a shaking voice, “but what can we do? I cannot now boast of her beauty and her chastity to Comte d’Arcos, to whom I hoped to marry her.”
“But a single fault is not vice,” said the old woman, pitying as the angels.
“Her mother gave her to this man,” said Perez.
“Yes, in a moment; without consulting the poor child!” cried Dona Lagounia.
“She knew what she was doing.”