Renovales, who studied his wife closely in his eagerness to recover
peace in his house, soon discovered the true cause of her illness.

Milita was growing up; already she was a woman. She was fourteen years
old and wore long skirts, and her healthy beauty was beginning to
attract the glances of men.

"One of these days they'll carry her off," said the master laughing.
And his wife, when she heard him talking about marriage, making
conjectures on his future son-in-law, closed her eyes and said in a
tense voice, that revealed her insuperable obstinacy:

"She shall marry anyone she wants to,--except a painter. I would rather
see her dead than that."

It was then Renovales divined his wife's true illness. It was jealousy,
a terrific, deadly, ruinous jealousy; it was the sadness of realizing
that she was sickly. She was certain of her husband; she knew his
declarations of faithfulness to her. But when the painter spoke of his
artistic interests in her presence, he did not hide his worship of
beauty, his religious cult of form. Even if he was silent, she
penetrated his thoughts; she read in him that fervor which dated from
his youth and had grown greater as the years went by. When she looked at
the statues of sovereign nakedness that decorated the studios, when she
glanced through the albums of pictures where the light of flesh shone
brightly amid the shadows of the engraving, she compared them mentally
with her own form emaciated by illness.

Renovales' eyes that seemed to worship every beauty of form were the
same eyes that saw her in all her ugliness. That man could never love
her. His faithfulness was pity, perhaps habit, unconscious virtue. She
could not believe that it was love. This illusion might be possible with
another man, but he was an artist. By day he worshiped beauty; at night
he was brought face to face with ugliness, with physical wretchedness.

She was constantly tormented by jealousy, that embittered her mind and
consumed her life, a jealousy that was inconsolable for the very reason
that it had no real foundation.

The consciousness of her ugliness brought with it a sadness, an
insatiable envy of everyone, a desire to die but to kill the world
first, that she might drag it down with her in her fall.

Her husband's caresses irritated her like an insult. Maybe he thought he
loved her, maybe his advances were in good faith, but she read his
thoughts and she found there her irresistible enemy, the