Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/216

 often is a man's only means of improving his state. If I cannot be a millionaire, I will be a working man, a day-laborer, but I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that the daily wage that I earn will be my own, whether much or little, and not be swallowed up by the false appearances to which my social position has committed me, more pauperizing by far than poverty itself. If I have a duro, I shall have it to eat, to buy a blouse and a pair of corduroy trousers, to rent a whitewashed room, with perhaps a half-dozen chairs. I shall not be as I am now, when, though I have double, it must all go for starched shirts and top-hats and patent-leather shoes, and a home as cheerless and unhygienic as any day-laborer's, but plastered over with vain display, which, while it does not make it healthier or happier, greatly increases the cost. I shall have more, having less, because it will be all mine, and not be devoted to keeping up a pretense of being what I am not, what I can never be. I shall drop out of this debilitated middle class, impoverished in body and soul by all the meals on which it has economized, by all the pleasures which it has sacrificed, by all its petty meannesses in whatever makes for largeness of life, this contemptible middle class, which might have developed into a great power, if instead of becoming a caricature of those which are above, it had set an example to those which are below.

. Yes, I suppose you are right. I agree with you. To parody the poet, we have either too little money to be comfortable, or too many necessities. And they are fictitious necessities, which a false social standard imposes. Revolution is out of the question with persons in our station. We are not poor enough to be pitied nor strong enough to be feared. Our poverty is our own fault, however we struggle to conceal it, and struggle we do in every sense of the