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wanting it so much that at last I really believed it? That was
the beginning of what led to the rest. Gunnar, I did believe
that I could make them happy — and yet I did only harm.”
She had risen and was pacing up and down the floor.
“Do you believe that the well you speak of will ever be pure
and clear again to one who knows she has muddied it herself?
Do you think it is easier for me to resign now? I longed for
the same that all girls long for, and I long for it now, but I
know that I have now a past which makes it impossible for me
to accept the only happiness I care for. Pure, unspoilt, and
sound it should be — but none of these conditions can I ever
fulfil — not now. My experiences of these two last years are
what I must be satisfied to call my life — and for the rest of
it I shall just have to go on longing for the impossible.”
“Jenny,” said Gunnar, “I am sure I am right in saying
again that it depends on yourself if these memories are going
to spoil your life, or if you will consider them a lesson, however
hard it may be, and still believe that the aim you once set for
yourself is the only right one for you.”
“But can you not see it is impossible? It has sunk too deep;
it has eaten into me like a corrosive acid, and I feel that what
was once my inmost self is crumbling to pieces. Yet I don’t
want it — I don’t want it. Sometimes I am inclined to — I
don’t know really what — to stop all the thoughts at once.
Either to die — or to live a mad, awful life — drown in a
misery still greater than the present one. To go down in the
mud so deep and so thoroughly that nothing but the end will
come of it. Or” — she spoke low, with a wild, stifled voice —
“to throw myself under a train — to know in the last second
that now — just now — my whole body, nerves, heart, and
brain will be made into one single shivering bloodstained heap.”
“Jenny,” he cried, white in the face, “I cannot bear to hear
you speak like this!”
“I am hysterical,” she said soothingly, but she went to the
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