Rosmer. An inquiry?
Kroll. Yes, if I ask you questions about one or two things that it may be painful for you to recall to mind. For instance, the matter of your apostasy—well, your emancipation, if you choose to call it so—is bound up with so much else for which, for your own sake, you ought to account to me.
Rosmer. My dear fellow, ask me about anything you please. I have nothing to conceal.
Kroll. Well, then, tell me this—what do you yourself believe was the real reason of Beata's making away with herself?
Rosmer. Can you have any doubt? Or perhaps I should rather say, need one look for reasons for what an unhappy sick woman, who is unaccountable for her actions, may do?
Kroll. Are you certain that Beata was so entirely unaccountable for her actions? The doctors, at all events, did not consider that so absolutely certain.
Rosmer. If the doctors had ever seen her in the state in which I have so often seen her, both night and day, they would have had no doubt about it.
Kroll. I did not doubt it either, at the time.
Rosmer. Of course not. It was impossible to doubt it, unfortunately. You remember what I told you of her ungovernable, wild fits of passion—which she expected me to reciprocate. She terrified me! And think how she tortured herself with baseless self-reproaches in the last years of her life!
Kroll. Yes, when she knew that she would always be childless.