At the outset I said to the husband I chose: "I shall cherish your happiness as much as I cherish my love for you; and if ever your happiness assumes the features of another woman, that woman shall be dear to me."
When another woman approached, I knitted my brows and formed a secret vow to blacken her in his eyes.
He loved me as you love your life, as you sing, as you kiss. And I reproached him for not leaning over close enough and telling me tender things over and over again every day. I had plighted my troth; in order not to take it back, I needed actions, words; to keep it, I had to put his heart to the proof.
When I came to know another love, my instinct could not rise to the height of my idea. I did not know how to bring the two men together, nor did I know how to make the woman who loved him receive the truth.
And I allowed useless people, useless existences to come to me. I saw them fighting around me like quarrelsome, chattering sparrows around a tree; I saw them pillage and carry away in their beaks the ripe fruit of my days. To know how to live is to know how to choose. I did not know.
Everywhere shame. Everywhere in the past, the hell of what I have lost.
These hands capable of everything have done almost nothing. I contented myself with little and believed in humility.