Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/312

 publicly ridiculous by an insignificant whippersnapper of a clerk, while you stand by and laugh, and have the bad taste to applaud him?

. If your young protégé had had the sense to mind his own business, instead of meddling among his betters with his impertinence

. Impertinence? He merely insisted that they should do their duty. He is accustomed to the discipline of a Parisian office, where the employees are trained to obey and to respect their superiors. Here, of course, with our sidewalk democracy, one man is as good as another—we are all gentlemen, hidalgos who work as a favor when some one pats us on the back, or bribes us by a show of familiarity between superior and inferior. That is our conception of business.

. You say that because it suits your convenience. Nobody is more affable than you are, nor treats people with greater consideration in the true Spanish fashion, nor are you less respected for it. That young cub fancied he had been ordained to initiate us in the ridiculous routine of the French bureaucracy, where a subordinate no sooner finds himself seated behind a desk or at an office-window, than he imagines that he belongs to a special aristocracy, which is superior to the rest of mankind.

. If anybody was dissatisfied, why didn't they come to me? This is a conspiracy; somebody is behind it.

. I suppose I am? Is that it?

. And you are not the only one. You have been influenced by your wife.

. By Carmen? What do you mean?

. No, not precisely by her either—by Isabel. They are always together; they could not well be more intimate.