[Passionately.] And do you know that just that love—it is burning and seething in me as hotly as ever before?
And I? Have you forgotten who I now am?
Be who or what you please, for aught I care! For me, you are the woman I see in my dreams of you.
I have stood on the turn-table-naked—and made a show of myself to many hundreds of men—after you.
It was I that drove you to the turn-table—blind as I then was—I, who placed the dead clay-image above the happiness of life—of love.
[Looking down.] Too late—too late!
Not by a hairsbreadth has all that has passed in the interval lowered you in my eyes.
[With head erect.] Nor in my own!
Well, what then! Then we are free—and there is still time for us to live our life, Irene.
[Looks sadly at him.] The desire for life is dead in me, Arnold. Now I have arisen. And I look for you. And I find you.—And then I see that you and life lie dead—as I have lain.