Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 11).djvu/485

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The love that belongs to the life of earth—the beautiful, miraculous earth-life—the inscrutable earth-life—that is dead in both of us.

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[Passionately.] And do you know that just that love—it is burning and seething in me as hotly as ever before?

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And I? Have you forgotten who I now am?

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Be who or what you please, for aught I care! For me, you are the woman I see in my dreams of you.

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I have stood on the turn-table—naked—and made a show of myself to many hundreds of men—after you.

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It was I that drove you to the turn-table—blind as I then was—I, who placed the dead clay-image above the happiness of life—of love.

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[Looking down.] Too late—too late!

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Not by a hairsbreadth has all that has passed in the interval lowered you in my eyes.