MANDERS. To be sure; you will plead excuses for your conduct—— MRS. ALVING. No. I will only tell you a story. MANDERS. Well——? MRS. ALVING. All that you have just said about my husband and me, and our life after you had brought me back to the path of duty—as you called it—about all that you know nothing from personal observation. From that moment you, who had been our intimate friend, never set foot in our house again. MANDERS. You and your husband left the town immediately after. MRS. ALVING. Yes; and in my husband’s lifetime you never came to see us. It was business that forced you to visit me when you undertook the affairs of the Orphanage. MANDERS. [_Softly and hesitatingly._] Helen—if that is meant as a reproach, I would beg you to bear in mind—— MRS. ALVING. ——the regard you owed to your position, yes; and that I was a runaway wife. One can never be too cautious with such unprincipled creatures. MANDERS. My dear—Mrs. Alving, you know that is an absurd exaggeration—— MRS. ALVING. Well well, suppose it is. My point is that your judgment as to my married life is founded upon nothing but common knowledge and report. MANDERS. I admit that. What then? MRS. ALVING. Well, then, Pastor Manders—I will tell you the truth. I have sworn to myself that one day you should know it—you alone! MANDERS. What is the truth, then? MRS. ALVING. The truth is that my husband died just as dissolute as he had lived all his days. MANDERS. [_Feeling after a chair._] What do you say? MRS. ALVING. After nineteen years of marriage, as dissolute—in his desires at any rate—as he was before you married us. MANDERS. And those—those wild oats—those irregularities—those excesses, if you like—you call “a dissolute life”? MRS. ALVING. Our doctor used the expression. MANDERS. I do not understand you. MRS. ALVING. You need not. MANDERS. It almost makes me dizzy. Your whole married life, the seeming union of all these years, was nothing more than a hidden abyss! MRS. ALVING. Neither more nor less. Now you know it. MANDERS. This is—this is inconceivable to me. I cannot grasp it! I cannot realise it! But how was it possible to——? How could such a state of things be kept secret? MRS. ALVING.