She excused him gently with a kindness that seemed not of this world, generously passing over the cruelty and selfishness of a life she was about to leave. Men like him were exceptional; they ought to live alone, by themselves, like those great trees that absorb all the life from the ground and do not allow a single plant to grow in the space which their roots reach. She was not strong enough to stand isolation; in order to live she must have the shadow of tenderness, the certainty of being loved. She ought to have married a man like other men; a simple being like herself, whose only longings were modest and commonplace. The painter had dragged her into his extraordinary path out of the easy, well-beaten roads that the rest follow and she was falling by the wayside, old in the prime of her youth, broken because she had gone with him in this journey which was beyond her strength.
Renovales was walking about with ceaseless protests.
"Why, what nonsense you are talking! You are raving! I have always loved you, Josephina. I love you now."
Her eyes suddenly became hard. A flash of anger crossed their pupils.
"Stop; don't lie. I know of a pile of letters that you have in your studio, hidden behind the books in your library. I have read them one by one. I have been following them as they came; I discovered your hiding place when you had only three of them. You know that I see through you; that I have a power over you, that you can hide nothing from me. I know your love affairs."
Renovales felt his ears buzzing, the floor slipping from under his feet. What astounding witchcraft! Even the letters so carefully hidden had been discovered by that woman's divining instinct!
"It's a lie!" he cried vehemently to conceal his agitation. "It isn't love! If you have read them, you know what it is as well as I; just friendship; the letters of a friend who is somewhat crazy."
The sick woman smiled sadly. At first it was friendship—even less than that, the perverse amusement of a flighty woman who liked to play with a celebrated man, exciting in him the enthusiasm of youth. She knew her childhood companion; she was sure it would not go any farther; and so she pitied the poor man in the midst of his mad love. But afterward something extraordinary had certainly happened; something that she could not explain and which had upset all of her calculations. Now her husband and Concha were lovers.
"Do not deny it; it is useless. It is this certainty that is killing me. I realized it when I saw you distracted, with a happy smile as if you were relishing your thoughts. I realized it in the merry songs you sang when you awoke in the morning, in the perfume with which you were impregnated and which followed you everywhere. I did not need to find any more letters. The odor around you, that perfume of infidelity, of sin, which always accompanied you, was enough. You, poor man, came home thinking that everything was left outside the door, and that odor follows you, denounces you; I think I can still perceive it."
And her nostrils dilated, as she breathed with a pained expression, closing her eyes as though she wished to escape the images which that perfume called up in her. Her husband persisted in his denials, now that he was convinced that she had no other proof of his infidelity. A lie! An hallucination!