Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Second series (IA playsbyjacintobe00bena).pdf/95

 Do you flatter yourself that any amount of good behavior, or the enduring of a thousand privations, will gain us the favor of the Emperor? How silly! No, there is only one course to pursue: the Emperor will never yield except before a scandal, or when the outcry of my creditors threatens to make him ridiculous.

. Are you serious about accepting money from the Comte de Tournerelles? Do you realize what that involves? Are you crazy? Do you know to what you will be committing yourself, what he will undoubtedly think, what he will have the impudence to expect of you?

. Nothing of the sort! He neither thinks nor expects anything. He merely believes that he is coming off very cheaply, entertaining a Princess in his house at a clever bargain.

. Have you considered the persons you will be obliged to meet in his house?

. Yes, I have; I can imagine who they will be. Men and women with passions, with vices, with interests and necessities, with flesh and blood and nerves—people who live, who struggle and fight for their lives, who love, hate, intrigue; people who are like everybody else, just the same as you and I. Why this insane desire to shut ourselves off from each other, to ticket and classify ourselves, to create distinctions between us, and fancy that we are superior to our fellows, when we are all equal and all belong to the same race, the poor, despised human race, which spends all its time dividing itself and hating itself and marking itself off into classes and castes and individuals, when all the sympathy and all the love in our hearts which might bind us together would be too little even then among so many to alleviate the sorrows of life?

. Oh, Your Highness!… His Highness and