Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/50

 bounds which are fixed for them by authority—bounds as inviolable as the frontiers of our country. What have you to offer in exchange for a life lived without love?

. Without love? Is there no other love than that woman's?

. Not for me. A man never loves more than once in his life; the only love for him is that of the woman whom he loves. Of course, conceivably, there are a great many persons in the world a man might love, just as there are a great many women, a great many countries, a great many mothers. But our love is the only love for us; that is why we think it is the best—because it is ours, like our own country, or our own mother. Nobody has any choice in these things, yet we always think that ours is the best. The only one possible is ours.

. You were scarcely in a position to make a wise choice when you persistently absented yourself from Court and avoided association with women of your own rank and class, to hover behind the scenes of a theatre and cultivate the society of a comic-opera singer.

. Of an adorable, an intelligent woman, who has taught me to know myself, behind the scenes—which, no doubt, seems a terrible place to you—to live my own life, surrounded by real people who are living their own lives and succeeding strictly upon their merits. She has cured me of my prejudices, she has strengthened my will, she has aroused my conscience

. No doubt she has. Excellent theories à la Ibsen, à la Tolstoy, à la Nietzsche, those perturbers of weak minds, who, by the way, should have been born in Suavia. We should have attended to them and have made an example. Living your own life? Yes, the infallible excuse for every imaginable fault and delinquency. Being yourself,