him.] You?

BORKMAN.
Not of what I have done amiss. All the world knows that.

MRS. BORKMAN.
[With a bitter sigh.] Yes, that is true; all the world knows
that.

BORKMAN.
But it does not know why I did it; why I had to do it. People
do not understand that I had to, because I was myself--because I
was John Gabriel Borkman--myself, and not another. And that is
what I will try to explain to you.

MRS. BORKMAN.
[Shaking her head.] It is of no use. Temptations and promptings
acquit no one.

BORKMAN.
They may acquit one in one's own eyes.

MRS. BORKMAN.
[With a gesture of repulsion.] Oh, let all that alone! I have
thought over that black business of yours enough and to spare.

BORKMAN.
I too. During those five endless years in my cell--and elsewhere
--I had time to think it over. And during the eight years up there
in the gallery I have had still more ample time. I have re-tried
the whole case--by myself. Time after time I have re-tried it. I
have been my own accuser, my own defender, and my own judge. I
have been more impartial than any one else could be--that I venture
to say. I have paced up and down the gallery there, turning every
one of my actions upside down and inside out. I have examined them
from all sides as unsparingly, as pitilessly, as any lawyer of them
all. And the final judgment I have always come to is this: the one
person I have sinned against is--myself.

MRS. BORKMAN.
And what about me? What about your son?

BORKMAN.
You and he are included in what I mean when I say myself.

MRS. BORKMAN.
And what about the hundreds of others, then--the people you are
said to have ruined?

BORKMAN.
[More vehemently.] I had power in my hands! And then I felt
the irresistible vocation within me! The prisoned millions lay
all over the country, deep in the bowels of the earth, calling
aloud to me! They shrieked to me to free them! But no one else
heard their cry--I alone had ears for it.

MRS. BORKMAN.
Yes, to the branding of the name of Borkman.

BORKMAN.
If the others had had the power, do you think they would not
have acted exactly as I did?

MRS. BORKMAN.
No one, no one but you would have done it!

BORKMAN.
Perhaps not. But that would have been because they had not my
brains. And if they had done it, it would not have been with my
aims in view. The act would have been a different act. In short,
I have acquitted myself.

ELLA RENTH