GUSTAV.  Go on!  She has an independent nature—­

ADOLPH.  Which cannot accept anything from me—­

GUSTAV.  But from everybody else.

ADOLPH. [After a pause] Yes.—­And it looked as if she especially hated my ideas because they were mine, and not because there was anything wrong about them.  For it used to happen quite often that she advanced ideas that had once been mine, and that she stood up for them as her own.  Yes, it even happened that friends of mine gave her ideas which they had taken directly from me, and then they seemed all right.  Everything was all right except what came from me.

GUSTAV.  Which means that you are not entirely happy?

ADOLPH.  Oh yes, I am happy.  I have the one I wanted, and I have never wanted anybody else.

GUSTAV.  And you have never wanted to be free?

ADOLPH.  No, I can’t say that I have.  Oh, well, sometimes I have imagined that it might seem like a rest to be free.  But the moment she leaves me, I begin to long for her—­long for her as for my own arms and legs.  It is queer that sometimes I have a feeling that she is nothing in herself, but only a part of myself—­an organ that can take away with it my will, my very desire to live.  It seems almost as if I had deposited with her that centre of vitality of which the anatomical books tell us.

GUSTAV.  Perhaps, when we get to the bottom of it, that is just what has happened.

ADOLPH.  How could it be so?  Is she not an independent being, with thoughts of her own?  And when I met her I was nothing—­a child of an artist whom she undertook to educate.

GUSTAV.  But later you developed her thoughts and educated her, didn’t you?

ADOLPH.  No, she stopped growing and I pushed on.

GUSTAV.  Yes, isn’t it strange that her “authoring” seemed to fall off after her first book—­or that it failed to improve, at least?  But that first time she had a subject which wrote itself—­for I understand she used her former husband for a model.  You never knew him, did you?  They say he was an idiot.

ADOLPH.  I never knew him, as he was away for six months at a time.  But he must have been an arch-idiot, judging by her picture of him. [Pause] And you may feel sure that the picture was correct.

GUSTAV.  I do!—­But why did she ever take him?

ADOLPH.  Because she didn’t know him well enough.  Of course, you never do get acquainted until afterward!

GUSTAV.  And for that reason one ought not to marry until—­ afterward.—­And he was a tyrant, of course?

ADOLPH.  Of course?

GUSTAV.  Why, so are all married men. [Feeling his way] And you not the least.

ADOLPH.  I?  Who let my wife come and go as she pleases—­

GUSTAV.  Well, that’s nothing.  You couldn’t lock her up, could you?  But do you like her to stay away whole nights?

ADOLPH.  No, really, I don’t.