to you, and I am proud of being your son; but it is only through her that I am that—and she has never yet really taken me to her heart. I am quite at liberty to go away or to stay, as I please; she is a fixture here. There is never one of her requests to me, scarcely a single wish she expresses—indeed, scarcely a sign of endearment she shows me, that she has not first of all divided up into three portions; and I get my one-third of it, and get it last or not at all.
Mother. He is jealous—and of us!
Father. Jealous of us!
Laura. Yes, indeed he is, mother.
Father. This is mere fancy, Axel—a ridiculous idea. Do not let any one else hear you saying that.
Axel. No, it is neither mere fancy nor is it ridiculous. It colours the whole of our relations to one another; it gnaws at my feelings, and then I torment her, make you angry, and lead an idle, empty, ill-tempered existence—
Father. You are ill, there is no doubt about it.
Axel. I am, and you have made me ill.
Father and Mother (together). We have?
Father. Please be a little—
Axel. You allow her to treat me simply as the largest sized of all the dolls you have given her to play with. You cannot bear to see her give away any more of her affection than she might give to one of her dolls.
Father. Please talk in a more seemly manner! Please show us a proper respect—
Axel. Forgive me, my dear parents, if I don't. What I mean is that a child cannot be a wife, and as long as she remains with you she will always be a child.
Mother. But, Axel, did we not tell you she was only a child—
Father. We warned you, we asked you to wait a year or two—
Mother. Because we could not see that she loved you sufficiently.
Father. But your answer was that it was just the child in her that you loved.
Mother. Just the child's innocence and simplicity. You said you felt purer in her presence; indeed, that she sometimes made you feel as if you were in church. And we, her father and mother, understood that, for we had felt it ourselves.
Father. We felt that just as much as you, my son.
Mother. Do you remember one morning, when she was asleep, that you said her life was a dream which it would be a sin to disturb?
Father. And said that the mere thought of her made you tread more softly for fear of waking her.
Axel. That is quite true. Her childlike nature shed happiness upon me, her gentle innocence stilled me. It is quite true that I felt her influence upon my senses like that of a beautiful morning.
Father. And now you are impatient with her for being a child!
Axel. Exactly! At the time when I was longing to lead her to the altar, I daresay I only thought of her as an inspiration to my better self and my best impulses. She was to me what the Madonna is to a good Catholic; but now she has become something more than that. The distance between us no longer exists; I cannot be satisfied with mere adoration, I must love; I cannot be satisfied with kneeling to her, I need my arms around her. Her glance has the same delicacy it always had, the same innocence; but I can no longer sit and gaze at her by the hour. Her glance must lose itself in mine in complete surrender. Her hand, her arm, her mouth are the same as they were; but I need to feel her hand stroking my hair, her arm round my neck, her mouth on mine; her thoughts must embrace mine and be like sunshine in my heart. She was a symbol to me, but the symbol has become flesh and blood. When first she came into my thoughts it was as a child; but I have watched her day by day grow into a woman, whose shyness and ignorance make her turn away from me, but whom I must possess. (LAURA moves quickly towards him.)
Mother. He loves our child!
Father. He loves her! (Embraces his wife.) What more is there to say, then? Everything is as it should be. Come along and have a glass of sherry!
Axel. No, everything is not as it should be. I can get her gratitude sometimes in a lucky moment, but not her heart. If I am fond of a certain thing, she is not. If I wish a thing, she wishes the opposite—for instance, if it's only a question of going to a ball, she won't take any pleasure in it unless her mother can go too.
Mother. Good heavens, is it nothing but that!
Laura. No, mother, it is nothing else; it is this ball.
Father. Then for any sake go to the ball! You are a couple of noodles. Come along, now.
Axel. The ball? It is not the ball. I don't care a bit about the ball.
Laura. No, that is just it, mother. When he gets what he wants, it turns out that it wasn't what he wanted at all, but something quite different. I don't understand what it is.
Axel. No, because it is not a question of any one thing, but of our whole relations to one another. Love is what I miss; she does not know what it means, and never will know—as long as she remains at home here. (A pause.)
Mother (slowly). As long as she remains at home?
Father (coming nearer to him, and trembling slightly). What do you mean by that?
Axel. It will be only when Laura finds she can no longer lean upon her parents, that she may possibly come to lean upon me.
Mother. What does he mean?
Father. I don't understand—
Axel. If she is to be something more than a good daughter—if she is to be a good wife—Laura must go away from here.
Mother. Laura go away?
Father. Our child?
Laura (to her MOTHER). Mother!
Axel. It would be wronging her whom I love so deeply, it would be wronging myself, and wronging you who mean so well, if now, when the power is in my hands, I had not the spirit to make use of it. Here, Laura lives only for you; when you die, life will be over for her. But that is not what marriage means, that is not what she promised at the altar, and that is what I cannot submit to. To go on like this will only make us all unhappy; and that is why Laura must go with me! (The MOTHER starts forward; LAURA goes to MATHILDE.)
Father. You cannot mean what you say.
Axel. I am in deadly earnest, and no one can shake my resolution.
Mother. Then Heaven have mercy on us! (A pause.)
Father. You know, Axel, that God gave us five children; and you know, too, that He took four away from us again. Laura is now our only child, our only joy.
Mother. We can't bear to lose her, Axel! She has never been away from us a single day since she was born. She is the spoilt child of our sorrow; if death itself claimed her, we should have to hold fast on to her.
Father. Axel, you are not a wicked man; you have not come amongst us to make us all unhappy?
Axel. If I were to give in now, this state of things would occur again every week or so, and none of us could stand that. For that reason, my dear parents, prove yourselves capable of a sacrifice. Let us put
