JULIE. Yes, you _do!_! Your vanity makes you try to escape, but you shall understand. You think I daren’t speak, but I will. Do you suppose I will stay dumb and bear the kisses you give me, kisses which I end by returning. My lips when you kiss them draw back in repulsion and yet in the end they yield and go out to meet yours. Shall I go on? [_A pause. She looks him full in the face_]. No. You understand now. You can never again imagine the tears I shed are tears of love. They are tears of remorse and misery. I hate you after your kisses. Our love is a duel in which I am worsted because what is best in me turns traitor. I blush at your victories because you could never have gained them without the help of what is base in me, without the baseness you know how to excite. It is not I who yield. It is the animal in me. It is all that is vile. I hate you for the crime of our loveless marriage, the crime you force me to share. I admit you are not the only guilty one, you are not the only one worthy of contempt. But I have had enough of it. Enough of it. I will no longer spend my days weeping over the shame of my nights. Every evening I have said I will regain my freedom. Till now I have not dared to say the words that would release me. Now I have done it. I am free. ANTONIN [_shrugging his shoulders_] You are nothing of the sort. JULIE. What do you mean? ANTONIN. I mean that I have more common sense than you. I mean that it is my duty to guard you from these exaggerated fancies of yours. The bonds that join us are not to be broken by a whim. You are my wife and my wife you will remain. A divorce is impossible. I have given you no cause. You may leave me, of course, but you know the life of the woman who lives apart from her husband, a life without respect and without social position. No: you will stay with me. JULIE. And it is this prison that we call marriage. [_A pause_]. And when I think that I looked forward with longing to this: that I sighed for it: that all my girlhood I was hoping for it, dreaming of it. When I think that at this very moment there are girls kneeling by their bedsides, young girls whose hearts are yearning for this. [_She begins to cry_]. Ah, poor girls! Poor girls! If they only knew. [_She wipes her eyes, after a moment_] Just Heaven, what a fool I am. Here am I crying when I should be laughing. The thing is ludicrous. Why, if one dared, one would shake with laughter at it all. You may be tyrants, all of you, but you are so absurd that, when one thinks, one can scarcely hate you for it. What you have made of marriage! From start to finish: from the wedding morning, with its monkey tricks, its vanity, and its folly. When I think that there are still people who respect such mummery! [_She bursts out laughing_]. ANTONIN. Julie. Don’t laugh like that.