Cecilia tried to calm him down. If he himself confessed that it was all due to Venturita's frivolous nature, why should he excite himself about it? Jealousy was ridiculous; nobody in the world could suppose that Venturita regarded the duke as anything else than what he was--a married man, and an old one who might very well be her grandfather.
"No, I am not jealous," said the young man somewhat shamefacedly.
"Yes, you are, Gonzalo, although you don't know that you are. This anger and this excitement, what do they show but jealousy? And look here, my boy; allow me to say that it is not paying much compliment to yourself, and still less to your wife, for if you can imagine that Ventura can prefer this worn-out man to yourself, you credit her with very little taste."
She blushed as she said these words, and Gonzalo received the sally with a smile without being convinced. His instinct, which was stronger than his intelligence, told him that such an aberration was possible. However, he did not wish to pursue the discussion, because it was humiliating to press the point, even with his sister-in-law.
He wanted to tell his wife that he strongly objected to the conversations, confidences, glances, and coquettish smiles she lavished upon the duke, but he knew Venturita of old, and dreaded speaking to her himself. One of the biting remarks in which she excelled, or a mocking retort, easily upset him, and when he was upset like that he did not know where he was and where to stop.
This was the position of affairs when, the day following his conversation with Cecilia, he looked in at the Club as usual. Glancing at the papers on the centre table, his eye fell upon the last number of "The Youth of Sarrio." He hardly ever read the paper, for although he was not a party to the antagonistic attitude of his fellow-members, he was equally averse to the course taken by the Cabin community, and he avoided seeing the insults leveled at his father-in-law, that made his blood boil. But on this occasion he cast a careless glance at it, and stopped to read some of Periquito's verses on the charms of a certain lady, which made him roar with laughter. Under this effusion there was a short story with the heading, "_An Uncommon Kind of Husband_" and he began to peruse it in a perfunctory way: