ers?

Manders. I can't discuss such questions with you, Mrs. Alving; you are
by no means in the right frame of mind for that. But for you to dare to
say that it is cowardly of you--!

Mrs. Alving. I will tell you what I mean by that. I am frightened and
timid, because I am obsessed by the presence of ghosts that I never can
get rid of.

Manders. The presence of what?

Mrs. Alving. Ghosts. When I heard Regina and Oswald in there, it was
just like seeing ghosts before my eyes. I am half inclined to think we
are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from
our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old
dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind.
They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the
same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper
and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There
must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the
grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of
the light, all of us.

Manders. Ah!--there we have the outcome of your reading. Fine fruit it
has borne--this abominable, subversive, free-thinking literature!

Mrs. Alving. You are wrong there, my friend. You are the one who made
me begin to think; and I owe you my best thanks for it.

Menders. I!

Mrs. Alving. Yes, by forcing me to submit to what you called my duty
and my obligations; by praising as right and lust what my whole soul
revolted against, as it would against something abominable. That was
what led me to examine your teachings critically. I only wanted to
unravel one point in them; but as soon as I had got that unravelled,
the whole fabric came to pieces. And then I realised that it was only
machine-made.

Manders (softly, and with emotion). Is that all I accomplished by the
hardest struggle of my life?

Mrs. Alving. Call it rather the most ignominious defeat of your life.

Manders. It was the greatest victory of my life, Helen; victory over
myself.

Mrs. Alving. It was a wrong done to both of us.

Manders. A wrong?--wrong for me to entreat you as a wife to go back to
your lawful husband, when you came to me half distracted and crying:
"Here I am, take me!" Was that a wrong?

Mrs. Alving. I think it was.

Menders. We two do not understand one another.

Mrs. Alving. Not now, at all events.

Manders. Never--even in my most secret though