hs. To the kitchen and cellar! No time
to waste! Let curiosity torment you as it may, first of all go
and do your duty!" She drives them before her from the room, and
follows.

Senta is going, too, but Erik bars the way, pleading, "Stay, Senta,
stay for a moment! Release me from this torture--or, if you will,
destroy me quite!" She affects, as the simplest girl must, not to
understand. "Erik, what is it?"--"Oh, Senta, speak, say what is
to become of me! Your father is coming home. Before starting upon
a new voyage, he is sure to wish to carry out what he so often
has spoken of..."--"And what is that?"--"To give you a husband.
My heart with its unchanging love, my humble fortune, my hunter's
luck, these things being all I have to offer, will not your father
repulse me? And if my heart breaks with its misery, tell me, Senta,
who is there will speak a word for me?" He pleads warmly, young Erik;
he is at that age and point in life when not to obtain the woman he
has set his heart upon seems a calamity such as will extinguish
the sun, make the rest of life worthless; when refusal signifies
destruction, and he is not ashamed of this as a weakness, but proud
of it as a strength, and uses it as the most pertinent argument,
and feels no abjectness in confessing himself at the mercy of a
girl, a toy in her frail hands. He is the only lover of this type
in the Wagnerian assortment, and, it happens, the only one who
fails. Senta, we are permitted to divine, had not always felt as
removed from him as at this moment. It is but lately, no doubt,
with the turning perhaps of her seventeenth year, at some fuller
opening into womanhood, that her romantic dream has taken such
possession of her, and his warm-blooded urgent love become something
to withdraw from, without clearly formulated reason, by an instinct.
She tries now to silence him, to put him off with the excuse that
she must hurry to her father. But he is not to be put off. To detain
her, he reproaches. "You wish to avoid me!"--"I must go to the
harbour!"--"You shrink from me?"--"Oh, let me go!"--"You shrink
from the wound which yourself you made, the madness of love you
inspired? Oh, you shall hear me in this hour, shall hear the last
question I will ask. When my heart is breaking with anguish, will not
Senta herself speak a word for me?" She applies herself then to quiet
and comfort such evident suffering; he is after all flesh-and-blood
and close at hand, the other a dream.