t of bed, moving about the room in his night
clothing, searching on all sides, without knowing what he was looking
for, murmuring loving words to calm his wife.

She stopped crying, struggling to enunciate each syllable between her
sobs. She spoke with her head buried in her arms. The painter stopped to
listen to her, astounded at the coarse words that came from her lips, as
if the grief that stirred her soul had set afloat all the shameful,
filthy words she had heard in the streets that were hidden in the depth
of her memory.

"The ----!" (And here she uttered the classic word, naturally, as if she
had spoken thus all her life.) "The shameless woman! The ----!"

And she continued to volley a string of interjections which shocked her
husband to hear them coming from those lips.

"But whom are you talking about? Who is it?"

She, as if she were only waiting for his question, sat up in bed, got
onto her knees, looking at him fixedly, shaking her head on her delicate
neck, so that the short, straight locks of hair whirled around it.

"Whom do you suppose? The Alberca woman. That peacock! Look surprised!
You don't know what I mean! Poor thing!"

Renovales expected this, but when he heard it, he assumed an injured
expression, fortified by his determination to reform and by the
certainty that he was telling the truth. He raised his hand to his heart
in a tragic attitude, throwing back his shock of hair, not noticing the
absurdity of his appearance that was reflected in the bedroom mirror.

"Josephina, I swear by all that I love most in the world that your
suspicions are not true. I have had nothing to do with Concha. I swear
it by our daughter!"

The little woman became more irritated.

"Don't swear, don't lie, don't name my daughter. You deceiver! You
hypocrite! You are all alike!"

Did he think she was a fool? She knew everything that was going on
around her. He was a rake, a false husband, she had discovered it a few
months after their marriage; a Bohemian without any other education than
the low associations of his class. And the woman was as bad; the worst
in Madrid. There was a reason why people laughed at the count
everywhere. Mariano and Concha understood each other; birds of a
feather; they made fun of her in her own house, in the dark of the
studio.

"She is your mistress," she said with cold anger. "Come now, admit it.
Repeat all those shameless things about the rights of love and joy that
you talk a