GUSTAV. I just thought that was how it was. Children play at mother and father, but of course when they grow older they play at brother and sister--so as to conceal what requires concealment; they then discard their chaste desires; they play blind man's bluff till they've caught each other in some dark corner, where they're pretty sure not to be seen by anybody. [_With increased severity._] But they are warned by their inner consciences that an eye sees them through the darkness. They are afraid--and in their panic the absent man begins to haunt their imagination--to assume monstrous proportions--to become metamorphosed--he becomes a nightmare who oppresses them in that love's young dream of theirs. He becomes the creditor [_he raps slowly on the table three times with his finger, as though knocking at the door_] who knocks at the door. They see his black hand thrust itself between them when their own are reaching after the dish of pottage. They hear his unwelcome voice in the stillness of the night, which is only broken by the beating of their own pulses. He doesn't prevent their belonging to each other, but he is enough to mar their happiness, and when they have felt this invisible power of his, and when at last they want to run away, and make their futile efforts to escape the memory which haunts them, the guilt which they have left behind, the public opinion which they are afraid of, and they lack the strength to bear their own guilt, then a scapegoat has to be exterminated and slaughtered. They posed as believers in Free Love, but they didn't have the pluck to go straight to him, to speak straight out to him and say, "We love each other." They were cowardly, and that's why the tyrant had to be assassinated. Am I not right? ADOLF. Yes; but you're forgetting that she trained me, gave me new thoughts. GUSTAV. I haven't forgotten it. But tell me, how was it that she wasn't able to succeed in educating the other man--in educating him into being really modern? ADOLF. He was an utter ass. GUSTAV. Right you are--he was an ass; but that's a fairly elastic word, and according to her description of him, in her novel, his asinine nature seemed to have consisted principally in the fact that he didn't understand her. Excuse the question, but is your wife really as deep as all that? I haven't found anything particularly profound in her writings. ADOLF. Nor have I. I must really own that I too find it takes me all my time to understand her. It's as though the machinery of our brains couldn't catch on to each other properly--as though something in my head got broken when I try to understand her. GUSTAV. Perhaps you're an ass as well. ADOLF. No, I flatter myself I'm not that, and I nearly always think that she's in the wrong--and, for the sake of argument, would you care to read this letter which I got from her to-day? [_He takes a letter out of his pocketbook._] GUSTAV [_reads it cursorily_]. Hum, I seem to know the style so well.