"Certainly it would never have occurred to anyone but Fernando Monsalvat to defend those women seriously." Castro continued: "All the ladies have decided you must be the wildest libertine in Buenos Aires. Something of a reputation, eh?"
"The injustice of such an inference must be rather obvious," said Monsalvat. "It offends me, however, only in the abstract, as something wrong, and therefore ugly. So far as I am concerned personally, it is nothing to me at all.
"I shall continue being what I am—regardless of what people think." The doctor, much annoyed, suddenly abandoned his passive attitude. It was incompatible with his veneration for "society" to admit that an individual could be other than what "society" declared him to be.
"That is sheer nonsense," he broke in aggressively. "What counts is public opinion. A man is, in any practical sense, exactly and only what people consider him to be."
Monsalvat took no notice of the interruption.
"I am not sorry that I spoke up in defense of those poor women," he said, addressing his remarks to Ruiz de Castro alone. "I assure you, we do not know them. To us they seem like animals, things without souls, without personalities. Well, we're wrong. They are human beings. They feel, and love, and hate, like any one of us. But even though it should not be so, granted they are virtually animals, whose fault is it?"
"It's idiotic to blame society for the manner of living of these people," the doctor asserted roundly. "They behave as they do because they are degenerates."
"No, not degenerates: victims! Many of them try to work. Pitiful salaries, with debts they can't avoid, drive them into the power of vice. A few of them may, indeed, be degenerates—off-spring of feeble-minded or alcoholic parents for whom, in a more roundabout way, we are perhaps just as much to blame. But, on the whole, the cause of the social evil, as of other evils, is in me, in Ruiz, in you, in the man going by there in that automobile, in the factory owner, in the store proprietor, in the criminal laws which give a sanction to economic injustice, in our moral ideas, in our conceptions of life—in our civilization, in short. The fact is, we have no human sympathy, no sense of justice, no pity. Countless numbers of these poor girls might still be saved, because they have not yet completely lost their self-respect. But what have we ever done to rehabilitate one of them? Do we ever go into the places where they live with any purpose but a shameful one? Do we ever extend the hand of Christian fellowship to the outcast? Can any one of us say that he has never, even by tacit complicity, helped to bring about the degradation of any woman? No, we are all the accomplices, witting and unwitting, of an infinitude of crimes. And yet those girls are our sisters; creatures, as people say, with souls to save, unfortunates feeling the same call to life that we all feel, and, like all of us, destined to the death that engulfs all our hopes and all our sorrows...."
Ruiz de Castro, from temper of mind, and in spite of the circumstances in which life placed him, was not insensible to an idealistic appeal. His face showed the impression Monsalvat's words made on him. Not so his companion, however, who in this case, as in all others, was quite indifferent as to whether Monsalvat was right or not. For him the important point was that the whole discussion annoyed him, as something improper, in bad taste. It was Ercasty's belief that an educated man like Monsalvat, a "gentleman" in other words, ought to have the ideas and sentiments of his class. In defending workmen and prostitutes, and other kinds of low people, Monsalvat, in his opinion, was behaving like a vulgar plebeia. The doctor would have conceded to anyone the right to defend fend such unfortunates in the conventional way—with condescending charitableness, or with witty paradoxes; but this fellow was talking like a social agitator; attacking society, insulting class, ignoring tradition. What were policemen's clubs for except to use on such dangerous lunatics? As Ruiz and his companion bowed him a cold "good day," Monsalvat went up toward his front door. Chancing to turn around before going in, he caught a glimpse of the doctor still sputtering abuse in his direction. For his own part he pitied the man, with that exultant sense of superiority which a new vision brings.
As it was still only eleven o'clock, he decided to go at once to the house where his mother had lived, for a further talk with Moreno. At the door he met the latter's daughter. Monsalvat had first noticed Irene Moreno the night of his mother's death, and he had taken a liking to her. She had been so gentle, so affectionate towards Aquilina Severin, so skillful in tending her, so ready to do anything she could. The sight of the poor child now caused him a most painful impression: slight of frame, but graceful, nervous, agile, under a shock of almost blonde hair, she seemed a pretty little flower that was being trampled upon, bruised and soiled in that life of the tenements. To atone for the utter incompetence of the father, she and her mother sewed, embroidered, and in other ways made frantic efforts to assemble the pennies needed for the daily bread of that household. To Irene fell the care of her six younger brothers and sisters; and it was she who delivered her mother's and her own needle work at the stores.