_Bergmann's garden in the morning sunlight._ WENDLA. Why have you slipped out of the room?----To hunt violets!----Because Mother seems to laugh at me.----Why can't you bring your lips together any more?----I don't know.----Indeed I don't know, I can't find words----The path is like a velvet carpet, no pebbles, no thorns.----My feet don't touch the ground.----Oh, how I slept last night! Here they are.----I become as grave as a nun at communion.----Sweet violets!----Peace, little mother, I will put on my long dress.----Oh God, if somebody would come upon whose neck I could fall and tell! SCENE SEVEN. _Evening twilight. Light clouds in the sky. The path straggles through low bushes and coarse grass. The flow of the stream is heard in the distance._ MORITZ. Better and better.----I am not fit. Another may be able to climb to the top. I pull the door to behind me and step into the open.----I don't care enough about it to let myself be turned back. I haven't succeeded in forcing my way. How shall I force my way now!----I have no contract with God. Let them make out of the thing what they will. I have been forced.----I do not hold my parents answerable. At the same time, the worst must fall upon them. They were old enough to know what they were doing. I was a weakling when I came into the world----or else I would have been wise enough to become another being. Why should I be forced to pay for the fact that the others were here already! I must have fallen on my head----If anybody makes me a present of a mad dog I'll give him back a mad dog. And if he won't take back his mad dog, then I am human and---- I must have fallen on my head! Man is born by chance and should not, after mature consideration----It is to shoot oneself dead! The weather at least has shown itself considerate. The whole day it looked like rain and yet it has held off.----A rare peace rules in nature. Nowhere anything dazzling, exciting. Heaven and earth are like a transparent fabric. And everything seems so happy. The landscape is as sweet as the melody of a lullaby.----“Sleep, little prince, sleep on,” as Fräulein Snandulia sang. It's a shame she holds her elbows so awkwardly!----I danced for the last time at the Cäcilienfest. Snandulia only dances with good matches.----Her silk dress was cut low in front and in the back. In the back, down to her girdle and in the front down----unconscionably low.----She couldn't have worn a chemise.------That might be something able to affect me yet.----More than half curiosity.----It must be a wonderful sensation----a feeling as if one were being carried through the rapids----I should never tell anybody that I was experiencing something untried before----I would act as if I had done it all.--There is something shameful in growing up to be a man without having learned the chief function of masculinity.----You come from Egypt, honorable sir, and have not seen the pyramids?!