CAPTAIN. To be sure. But it rests with you whether you will run around it or stick your head into it.
LAURA. You say that you will kill yourself! You won't do that!
CAPTAIN. Are you sure? Do you think a man can live when he has nothing and no one to live for?
CAPTAIN. That I may keep my reason. Free me from my suspicions and I give up the conflict.
CAPTAIN. Yes, I have doubts, and you have awakened them.
CAPTAIN. Yes, you have dropped them like henbane in my ears, and circumstances have strengthened them. Free me from the uncertainty; tell me outright that it is true and I will forgive you beforehand.
LAURA. How can I acknowledge a sin that I have not committed?
CAPTAIN. What does it matter when you know that I shall not divulge it? Do you think a man would go and spread his own shame broadcast?
LAURA. If I say it isn't true, you won't be convinced; but if I say it is, then you will be convinced. You seem to hope it is true!
CAPTAIN. Yes, strangely enough; it must be, because the first supposition can't be proved; the latter can be.
LAURA. Have you tiny ground for your suspicions?
LAURA. I believe you want to prove me guilty, so that you can get rid of me and then have absolute control over the child. But you won't catch me in any such snare.
CAPTAIN. Do you think that I would want to be responsible for another man's child, if I were convinced of your guilt?
LAURA. No, I'm sure you wouldn't, and that's what makes me know you lied just now when you said that you would forgive me beforehand.
CAPTAIN. [Rises]. Laura, save me and my reason. You don't seem to understand what I say. If the child is not mine I have no control over her and don't want to have any, and that is precisely what you do want, isn't it? But perhaps you want even more--to have power over the child, but still have me to support you.
LAURA. Power, yes! What has this whole life and death struggle been for but power?
CAPTAIN. To me it has meant more. I do not believe in a hereafter; the child was my future life. That was my conception of immortality, and perhaps the only one that has any analogy in reality. If you take that away from me, you cut off my life.
CAPTAIN. Because the child bound us together; but the link became a chain. And how did it happen; how? I have never thought about this, but now memories rise up accusingly, condemningly perhaps. We had been married two years, and had no children; you know why. I fell ill and lay at the point of death. During a conscious interval of the fever I heard voices out in the drawing-room. It was you and the lawyer talking about the fortune that I still possessed. He explained that you could inherit nothing because we had no children, and he asked you if you were expecting to become a mother. I did not hear your reply. I recovered and we had a child. Who is its father?