Gustav. Nor do I.
Adolf. But why did you say you did?
Gustav. You make me pity you.
Adolf. Yes, I am indeed to be pitied. And now I’m bankrupt, absolutely—and the worst of it is I haven’t got her any more.
Gustav.[With a few steps toward the right.] What good would she be to you? She would be what God above was to me before I became an atheist—a subject on which I could lavish my reverence. You keep your feeling of reverence dark, and let something else grow on top of it—a healthy contempt, for instance.
Adolf. I can’t live without someone to reverence.
Gustav. Slave! [He goes, round the fable on the right.]
Adolf. And without a woman to reverence, to worship.
Gustav. Oh, the deuce! Then you go back to that God of yours—if you. really must have something on which you can crucify yourself; but you call yourself an atheist when you’ve got the superstitious belief in women in your own blood; you call yourself a free thinker when you can’t think freely about a lot of silly women. Do you know what all this illusive quality, this sphinx-like mystery, this profundity in your wife’s temperament all really comes to? The whole thing is sheer stupidity; why, the woman can’t distinguish between A.B. and a bull’s foot for the life of her. And look here, it’s something shoddy in the mechanism, that’s where the fault lies. Outside it looks like a fifty-guinea hunting watch, open it and you find it’s tuppenny-halfpenny gun-metal. [He comes up to ADOLF.] Put her in trousers, draw a mustache under her nose with a piece of coal, and then listen to her in the same state of mind, and then you’ll be perfectly convinced that it is quite a different kettle of fish altogether—a gramophone which reproduces, with rather less volume, your words and other people’s words. Do you know how a woman is constituted? Yes, of course you do. A boy with the breasts of a mother, an immature man, a precocious child whose growth has been stunted, a chronically anaemic creature that has a regular emission of blood thirteen times in the year. What can you do with a thing like that?
Adolf. Yes—but—but then how can I believe—that we are really on an equality?