an exhibition then where I didn’t hold a place of honour.  Sometimes you were St. Cecilia, and sometimes Mary Stuart—­or little Karin, whom King Eric loved.  And I turned public attention in your direction.  I compelled the clamorous herd to see yon with my own infatuated vision.  I plagued them with your personality, forced you literally down their throats, until that sympathy which makes everything possible became yours at last—­and you could stand on your own feet.  When you reached that far, then my strength was used up, and I collapsed from the overstrain—­in lifting you up, I had pushed myself down.  I was taken ill, and my illness seemed an annoyance to you at the moment when all life had just begun to smile at you—­ and sometimes it seemed to me as if, in your heart, there was a secret desire to get rid of your creditor and the witness of your rise.  Your love began to change into that of a grown-up sister, and for lack of better I accustomed myself to the new part of little brother.  Your tenderness for me remained, and even increased, but it was mingled with a suggestion of pity that had in it a good deal of contempt.  And this changed into open scorn as my talent withered and your own sun rose higher.  But in some mysterious way the fountainhead of your inspiration seemed to dry up when I could no longer replenish it—­or rather when you wanted to show its independence of me.  And at last both of us began to lose ground.  And then you looked for somebody to put the blame on.  A new victim!  For you are weak, and you can never carry your own burdens of guilt and debt.  And so you picked me for a scapegoat and doomed me to slaughter.  But when you cut my thews, you didn’t realise that you were also crippling yourself, for by this time our years of common life had made twins of us.  You were a shoot sprung from my stem, and you wanted to cut yourself loose before the shoot had put out roots of its own, and that’s why you couldn’t grow by yourself.  And my stem could not spare its main branch—­and so stem and branch must die together.

TEKLA.  What you mean with all this, of course, is that you have written my books.

ADOLPH.  No, that’s what you want me to mean in order to make me out a liar.  I don’t use such crude expressions as you do, and I spoke for something like five minutes to get in all the nuances, all the halftones, all the transitions—­but your hand-organ has only a single note in it.

TEKLA.  Yes, but the summary of the whole story is that you have written my books.

ADOLPH.  No, there is no summary.  You cannot reduce a chord into a single note.  You cannot translate a varied life into a sum of one figure.  I have made no blunt statements like that of having written your books.

TEKLA.  But that’s what you meant!

ADOLPH. [Beyond himself] I did not mean it.

TEKLA.  But the sum of it—­

ADOLPH. [Wildly] There can be no sum without an addition.  You get an endless decimal fraction for quotient when your division does not work out evenly.  I have not added anything.