Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/141

. As you see, we are known. Our presence here is no secret.

. Where shall we go where we may cease to be what we are? Among these people, upon the uttermost edge of society, we fancied that we were forgotten. But the gendarme reminds us that he is in the secret; he is watching over us, to protect us.

. It cannot be helped; you heard what he said. These people are dangerous.

. People are dangerous everywhere; the whole world is like this, and so are our own souls—the eternal struggle of life, force against force, the hand of those who seek to live their own lives as individuals in the name of human instinct, against the hand of those who would maintain the social fabric in the common name of all. On the one side the criminal, on the other the police; and in the great world as in this little world, all the classes which do duty as police, with their codes afof [sic] morals, their sacrosanct dignities and their laws, are able to accomplish no more in their fight with the classes which we call criminal, than we see them do here; they impart an air of gayety to the dance, which seems to be respectable under the paternal eye of the police, while in reality the dancers are doing nothing but plotting and scheming to outwit them. The very life of these people is to outwit the police. How would any human life be possible if we were not able to outwit the social laws?

. I am amazed to hear you talk. How is it that you were permitted reading so radical, so subversive at the Court of Suavia?

. Does it sound as if it were reading to you? No, the ideas are my own. I feel as I do because I have never allowed myself to be frightened by any truth, and I have never become so enamored of any, that I have been