m with your personality, forced you literally
down their throats, until that sympathy which makes everything
possible became yours at last--and you could stand on your own
feet. When you reached that far, then my strength was used up, and
I collapsed from the overstrain--in lifting you up, I had pushed
myself down. I was taken ill, and my illness seemed an annoyance
to you at the moment when all life had just begun to smile at you--
and sometimes it seemed to me as if, in your heart, there was a
secret desire to get rid of your creditor and the witness of your
rise. Your love began to change into that of a grown-up sister,
and for lack of better I accustomed myself to the new part of
little brother. Your tenderness for me remained, and even
increased, but it was mingled with a suggestion of pity that had
in it a good deal of contempt. And this changed into open scorn as
my talent withered and your own sun rose higher. But in some
mysterious way the fountainhead of your inspiration seemed to dry
up when I could no longer replenish it--or rather when you wanted
to show its independence of me. And at last both of us began to
lose ground. And then you looked for somebody to put the blame on.
A new victim! For you are weak, and you can never carry your own
burdens of guilt and debt. And so you picked me for a scapegoat
and doomed me to slaughter. But when you cut my thews, you didn't
realise that you were also crippling yourself, for by this time
our years of common life had made twins of us. You were a shoot
sprung from my stem, and you wanted to cut yourself loose before
the shoot had put out roots of its own, and that's why you
couldn't grow by yourself. And my stem could not spare its main
branch--and so stem and branch must die together.

TEKLA. What you mean with all this, of course, is that you have
written my books.

ADOLPH. No, that's what you want me to mean in order to make me
out a liar. I don't use such crude expressions as you do, and I
spoke for something like five minutes to get in all the nuances,
all the halftones, all the transitions--but your hand-organ has
only a single note in it.

TEKLA. Yes, but the summary of the whole story is that you have
written my books.

ADOLPH. No, there is no summary. You cannot reduce a chord into a
single note. You cannot translate a varied life into a sum of one
figure. I have made no blunt statements like that of having
written your books.

TEKLA. But that's what