Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/294

. Good night, María Antonia. Rest quietly and calm your nerves, I do hate to see you uncomfortable.

. Of course. Good night, everybody. Good night… Are you coming along?

. Gladly.

. Poor María Antonia! The first disillusionments of married life.

. They are the saddest, the most cruel; we have both passed through the experience. Luisita listens horrified… you must not mind us, my dear. However clear the warning of our experience may be, you are too young to abandon a single illusion, or avoid in the future so much as one of the disenchantments of life. Nobody can learn through the experience of another. We sat at our mother's feet and listened, precisely as you do at ours, and our mothers listened to their mothers, yet we have all confided our hearts to a man with the same love, the same faith, and the same illusions as they. Life would be even sadder than it is if we were to realize upon its threshold, that we do no more in living than reincarnate the sorrows of those who have passed before us through life.

. María Antonia ought never to have married Pepe. To be happy, a girl must marry only when she is very much in love. I shall never marry in any other way. I must marry a man whom I love with my whole soul, and who loves me with his; then what reason can there be why we should not be happy? María Antonia would have been very happy if she had married Enrique. I am sorry for my poor brother; it was foolish of them both. I have never yet been able to understand why they drifted apart. I suppose the fault was Enrique's—some slight of his, perhaps, or a mistake, which María Antonia was unwilling to forgive.