Basil.
We're too different. It's impossible for it to get better. We can't even go on as we have been. I've felt that the end was coming.
Hilda.
But try—try for my sake.
Basil.
You don't know what it is. Everything she says, everything she does, jars upon me so frightfully. I try to restrain myself. I clench my teeth to prevent myself from breaking out at her. Sometimes I can't help it, and I say things that I'd give anything to have left unsaid. She's dragging me down. I'm getting as common and vulgar as she is.
Hilda.
How can you say that of your wife?
Basil.
Don't you think I must have gone through a good deal before I could acknowledge to myself what she was? I'm chained to her for all my life. And when I look into the future—I see her a vulgar, slatternly shrew like her mother, and myself abject, degraded, and despicable. The woman never tires in her conflict with the man, and in the end he always succumbs. A man, when he marries a woman like that, thinks he's going to lift her up to his own station. The fool! It's she who drags him down to hers.