And you have no right to. Not to _despise_ me!—Lona, you cannot conceive how unspeakably alone I stand, here in this narrow, stunted society—how, year by year, I have had to put a tighter curb on my ambition for a full and satisfying life-work. What have I accomplished, for all the show it makes? Scrap-work—odds and ends. There is no room here for other and larger work. If I tried to go a step in advance of the views and ideas of the day, all my power was gone. Do you know what we are, we, who are reckoned the pillars of society? We are the tools of society, neither more nor less. LONA. Why do you only see this now? BERNICK. Because I have been thinking much of late—since you came home—and most of all this evening.—Oh, Lona, why did I not know you through and through, then—in the old days? LONA. What then? BERNICK. I should never have given you up; and, with you by my side, I should not have stood where I stand now. LONA. And do you never think what she might have been to you—she, whom you chose in my stead? BERNICK. I know, at any rate, that she has not been anything that I required. LONA. Because you have never shared your life-work with her. Because you have never placed her in a free and true relation to you. Because you have allowed her to go on pining under the weight of shame you had cast upon those nearest her. BERNICK. Yes, yes, yes; falsehood and hollowness are at the bottom of it all. LONA. Then why not break with all this falsehood and hollowness? BERNICK. Now? It is too late now, Lona. LONA. Karsten, tell me—what satisfaction does this show and imposture give you? BERNICK. It gives me none. I must go under, along with the whole of this bungled social system. But a new generation will grow up after us; it is my son that I am working for; it is _his_ life-work that I am laying out for him. There will come a time when truth will find its way into our social order, and upon it he shall found a happier life than his father’s. LONA. With a lie for its groundwork? Think what it is you are giving your son for an inheritance. BERNICK. [_With suppressed despair._] I am giving him an inheritance a thousand times worse than you know of. But, sooner or later, the curse must pass away. And yet—and yet——[_Vehemently._] How could you bring all this upon my head! But it is done now. I must go on now. You _shall_ not succeed in crushing me! HILMAR TÖNNESEN, _with an open note in his hand, and much discomposed, enters quickly from the right._