As soon as it grows dark!
[He returns and grasps CLARA's hand.]
Girl, you stand before me—[He turns away.]
Thousands of your sex would have kept it a secret with shrewd cunning, and only in an hour of sweet forgetfulness would have confided it coaxingly to the ear and soul of their husbands. I feel what I owe you!
CLARA (alone).
Oh, my heart, lock yourself up! Crush yourself together so that not another drop of that blood may escape which would kindle again the congealing life in my veins! For a moment a feeling akin to hope arose in you again! Now for the first time I am conscious of it!
[Laughs.]
No! No man can, overlook that! And if—could you yourself overlook it? Would you have had the courage to grasp a hand that—No! no! Such evil courage you would not have! You would with your own hands have to lock yourself into your hell, if any one tried to open the door from the outside. You are forever—Oh, alas, that the pain is intermittent, that the piercing agony sometimes ceases! That is the reason why it lasts so long! The tortured man imagines he is resting when the torturer merely pauses to get his breath. It is like a drowning man's catching his breath on the waves, when the current that has drawn him under spews him forth again only to seize him once more and draw him down. He has nothing but a double, futile fight for life!—
Well, Clara?—Yes, father, I am going! Your daughter will not drive you
to self-destruction! Soon I shall be the wife of that man, or—God! No!
I do not go begging for happiness—it is misery, the deepest misery that
I beg for! You will give me my misery!—Away! Where is the letter?
[She takes it.]