g her--and I tried to prevent it.
There is nothing strange in that. But I was never afraid that she
might be deceiving me--

GUSTAV. No, that's what married men are never afraid of.

ADOLPH. Yes, isn't it queer? What I really feared was that her
friends would get such an influence over her that they would begin
to exercise some kind of indirect power over me--and _that_ is
something I couldn't bear.

GUSTAV. So your ideas don't agree--yours and your wife's?

ADOLPH. Seeing that you have heard so much already, I may as well
tell you everything. My wife has an independent nature--what are
you smiling at?

GUSTAV. Go on! She has an independent nature--

ADOLPH. Which cannot accept anything from me--

GUSTAV. But from everybody else.

ADOLPH. [After a pause] Yes.--And it looked as if she especially
hated my ideas because they were mine, and not because there was
anything wrong about them. For it used to happen quite often that
she advanced ideas that had once been mine, and that she stood up
for them as her own. Yes, it even happened that friends of mine
gave her ideas which they had taken directly from me, and then
they seemed all right. Everything was all right except what came
from me.

GUSTAV. Which means that you are not entirely happy?

ADOLPH. Oh yes, I am happy. I have the one I wanted, and I have
never wanted anybody else.

GUSTAV. And you have never wanted to be free?

ADOLPH. No, I can't say that I have. Oh, well, sometimes I have
imagined that it might seem like a rest to be free. But the moment
she leaves me, I begin to long for her--long for her as for my own
arms and legs. It is queer that sometimes I have a feeling that
she is nothing in herself, but only a part of myself--an organ
that can take away with it my will, my very desire to live. It
seems almost as if I had deposited with her that centre of
vitality of which the anatomical books tell us.

GUSTAV. Perhaps, when we get to the bottom of it, that is just
what has happened.

ADOLPH. How could it be so? Is she not an independent being, with
thoughts of her own? And when I met her I was nothing--a child of
an artist whom she undertook to educate.

GUSTAV. But later you developed her thoughts and educated her,
didn't you?

ADOLPH. No, she stopped growing and I pushed on.

GUSTAV. Yes, isn't it strange that her "authoring" seemed to fall
off after her first book--or that it failed to improve, at least?
But that first time she had a