Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/281

. I suppose I said what I did because I have had too much champagne?

. No, of course not. But I am sorry for poor Isabel.

. So am I. I am out of patience with Gonzalo; that is why I cannot hold my tongue. Nobody expects a married man to be as ideally faithful as his wife, but he ought to stray only occasionally, when it is of no importance. This notion of never being without a love-affair on his hands when he has a wife like Isabel… How have you the effrontery to complain of me? Compare us, now compare us…

. I? Complain of you? Never!

. Yes, you do. Women's imaginations are too active; you are too much given to romance. Did you notice Isabel's martyred air? Well, she enjoys it; she likes to feel her husband is that way. All this talk about love-affairs, about women who have lost their heads over him, this never being certain whether he is hers or whether he is not, makes him important in her eyes and surrounds him with a poetic halo. Isabel is more in love with her husband every day, you can take it from me, which she would never be after having been married all these years if Gonzalo were a husband like I am—without accidents, or anything that is romantic. Come, now, be honest: have you ever appreciated my incredible fidelity in the least? You think it is not virtue, but lack of ability to make myself attractive. Yes, you do. You do not love me as Isabel loves Gonzalo. I am a simple bourgeois, all prose, who is good enough to work and to strike balances, and provide for the future of my children. Why, if some day some hussy should come along and turn my head—which God forbid—yes, if it were for no more than half an hour—I should feel all the while that I