To struggle without truce or rest in this fierce battle of life 'for justice as Cervantes' immortal hero struggled in the world of his imagining! Folly! To love with an infinite love, and with the divine beauty of our desire ever beyond our reach, as was the Dulcinea he so passionately loved! Folly! To walk with the soul ever fronting the ideal, along the rough and prosaic path of human realities, which is like running after one of heaven's stars through crags and rocky places. Folly! Yes, so the doctors tell us; but of so inoffensive a form, and, upon the face of it, so little likely to prove contagious, that, to make an end of it, we do not need another Quixote. [Pause. Rises and walks to the middle of the stage, where he stands thinking.]
SCENE II
Don Lorenzo, Doña Ángela, and Dr. Tomás. The latter two stand at door on R., half-hidden by the curtains, and watch Don Lorenzo, whose back is toward them.
Doña Ángela. Look at him! as usual, reading and thinking.
Dr. Tomás. Madam, your husband is a sage, but wisdom may be overdone. For, if the tenser be the cord, the more piercing its notes, so the much easier is it to break. And when it breaks, to the divine note succeeds eternal silence. While the brain works in sublime spasms, madness is on the watch—don't forget it. [Pause.]
Don Lorenzo. Strange book! Book of inspiration! How many problems Cervantes, unknowing perhaps, has propounded therein! The hero was mad, yes, mad [pause], he who only gave ear to the voice of duty upon the march of life; he who ceaselessly subjugated his passions, silenced his affections, and knew no other rule than justice, no other law than truth—and to truth and justice conformed each action: who, with a sacrilegious ambition, strove to attain the perfection of God above.
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