ADOLPH. [Crushed] No!

GUSTAV.  Well, I don’t either.

ADOLPH.  Why, then, did you say you did?

GUSTAV.  Because I pitied you.

ADOLPH.  Yes, I am to be pitied!  For now I am bankrupt!  Finished!—­
And worst of all:  not even she is left to me!

GUSTAV.  Well, what could you do with her?

ADOLPH.  Oh, she would be to me what God was before I became an atheist:  an object that might help me to exercise my sense of veneration.

GUSTAV.  Bury your sense of veneration and let something else grow on top of it.  A little wholesome scorn, for instance.

ADOLPH.  I cannot live without having something to respect—­

GUSTAV.  Slave!

ADOLPH.—­without a woman to respect and worship!

GUSTAV.  Oh, HELL!  Then you had better take back your God—­if you needs must have something to kow-tow to!  You’re a fine atheist, with all that superstition about woman still in you!  You’re a fine free-thinker, who dare not think freely about the dear ladies!  Do you know what that incomprehensible, sphinx-like, profound something in your wife really is?  It is sheer stupidity!—­Look here:  she cannot even distinguish between th and t.  And that, you know, means there is something wrong with the mechanism.  When you look at the case, it looks like a chronometer, but the works inside are those of an ordinary cheap watch.—­Nothing but the skirts-that’s all!  Put trousers on her, give her a pair of moustaches of soot under her nose, then take a good, sober look at her, and listen to her in the same manner:  you’ll find the instrument has another sound to it.  A phonograph, and nothing else—­giving yon back your own words, or those of other people—­ and always in diluted form.  Have you ever looked at a naked woman—­ oh yes, yes, of course!  A youth with over-developed breasts; an under-developed man; a child that has shot up to full height and then stopped growing in other respects; one who is chronically anaemic:  what can you expect of such a creature?

ADOLPH.  Supposing all that to be true—­how can it be possible that
I still think her my equal?

GUSTAV.  Hallucination—­the hypnotising power of skirts!  Or—­the two of you may actually have become equals.  The levelling process has been finished.  Her capillarity has brought the water in both tubes to the same height.—­Tell me [taking out his watch]:  our talk has now lasted six hours, and your wife ought soon to be here.  Don’t you think we had better stop, so that you can get a rest?

ADOLPH.  No, don’t leave me!  I don’t dare to be alone!

GUSTAV.  Oh, for a little while only—­and then the lady will come.

ADOLPH.  Yes, she is coming!—­It’s all so queer!  I long for her, but I am afraid of her.  She pets me, she is tender to me, but there is suffocation in her kisses—­something that pulls and numbs.  And I feel like a circus child that is being pinched by the clown in order that it may look rosy-cheeked when it appears before the public.