Three cheers for Bernick!

Rummel (in a low voice, to BERNICK): This is the basest treachery--!

Sandstad (also in an undertone): So you have been fooling us!

Vigeland: Well, then, devil take--! Good Lord, what am I saying?
(Cheers are heard without.)

Bernick: Silence, gentlemen. I have no right to this homage you offer
me; because the decision I have just come to does not represent what
was my first intention. My intention was to keep the whole thing for
myself; and, even now, I am of opinion that these properties would be
worked to best advantage if they remained in one man's hands. But you
are at liberty to choose. If you wish it, I am willing to administer
them to the best of my abilities.

Voices: Yes, yes, yes!

Bernick: But, first of all, my fellow townsmen must know me thoroughly.
And let each man seek to know himself thoroughly, too; and so let it
really come to pass that tonight we begin a new era. The old era--with
its affectation, its hypocrisy and its emptiness, its pretence of
virtue and its miserable fear of public opinion--shall be for us like a
museum, open for purposes of instruction; and to that museum we will
present--shall we not, gentlemen?--the coffee service, and the goblet,
and the album, and the Family Devotions printed on vellum, and
handsomely bound.

Rummel: Oh, of course.

Vigeland (muttering): If you have taken everything else, then--

Sandstad: By all means.

Bernick: And now for the principal reckoning I have to make with the
community. Mr. Rorlund said that certain pernicious elements had left
us this evening. I can add what you do not yet know. The man referred
to did not go away alone; with him, to become his wife, went--

Lona (loudly): Dina Dorf!

Rorlund: What?

Mrs. Bernick: What? (Great commotion.)

Rorlund: Fled? Run away--with him! Impossible!

Bernick: To become his wife, Mr. Rorlund. And I will add more. (In a
low voice, to his wife.) Betty, be strong to bear what is coming.
(Aloud.) This is what I have to say: hats off to that man, for he has
nobly taken another's guilt upon his shoulders. My friends, I want to
have done with falsehood; it has very nearly poisoned every fibre of my
being. You shall know all. Fifteen years ago, I was the guilty man.

Mrs. Bernick (softly and tremblingly): Karsten!

Martha (similarly): Ah, Johan--!

Lona: Now at last you have found yourself!

(Speechless consternation among the audience.)

Bernick: Yes, friends, I w