Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/330

 grinding sickness, or disaster unforeseen, when no riches can avail. Life presents its bill. It takes your daughter, the absorbing passion of your life, the paragon of womanly submission in your eyes, of all the virtues which belong to honorable wives; and you are indignant, you are shocked; you yearn to punish your daughter, when it is your daughter who is punishing you, punishing you for her mother—for her mother and for me.

. Punishing me? But why? Why should she?

. What do men know about women? You understand the lies of the women who deceive you, but you have no conception of the love of a good woman, how deeply and truly she loves you. Reserve is always more instinctive in women than love. Our love is silent through reserve, through reserve our desires are silent, too, and our jealousy is silent oftentimes. Yet you do not, you will not understand that an honest woman cannot struggle without violence to her very being when your love turns away and grows cold. So we submit in silence to the humiliation and the pity of the women who attract you with all the coquetry and calculated coyness of their art, which you would despise in us, because even you can never confound their boudoirs with our homes. You take your passions to them, you fly to them in the easy irresponsibility of a certain sort of life; you squander upon them what you scrape and save with us, and implore of them lavish kisses which you would disdain in your wife, because her duty assures you of them—whenever your desire exacts, we obey—yes, your desire, which often enough is plainly only another desire which you have not been able to satisfy, and which drives you to us with all the appearances of love. This is what men are, and yet you presume to sit in judgment upon us at the suggestion even of a fault, without mercy. I tell you from my heart that I am