"Helga! You have never been kind to me--never since you came home a year ago--but now you are cruel."
"Am I? Perhaps I am. And perhaps I've gone through enough to make me so."
"You speak as if your disappointment of this morning in not going with Oscar were a great and grievous matter, but you don't seem to remember how often I have been disappointed in the same way."
"Oh, I dare say you think you are much to be pitied."
"I don't say I'm to be pitied, Helga, because I know it was my own fault at the beginning. But I do say I've never known a moment's peace since you came home from Denmark. I persuaded father to send for you because you were my sister, and I wished you to share my happiness, but you have never shown me any sisterly feeling--never. On the contrary, you found me happy and you have made me miserable. You have done your best to render life intolerable to me."
"I thought you said you were not to excite yourself, Thora?"
"It is you that are exciting me, Helga, because you are always inflicting the sharpest tortures upon me and hurting me where you know I can bear it least. From the first you tried to take Oscar away from me--you know you did. You tried to do it before our marriage and you have tried to do it ever since. You were not even ashamed to try during our honeymoon and you are trying now, because you have lost all sense of loyalty or justice or remorse or even shame."
"Oh, yes," said Helga, "you think you have been a great martyr. But would it surprise you to hear that somebody else has gone through a still greater martyrdom? You accuse me of having inflicted tortures upon you--what of the tortures you have inflicted upon me?"
"I, Helga?"
"Yes, you! You speak as if I were the sort of woman who draws a man into her net, who tears him away from the wife he loves and drags him down to his death. You would have been nearer right if you had thought of me as another kind of woman altogether--one who is herself the sufferer--who is shut out and cut off and must remain unmated because the man who loves her is married to somebody else."