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into a place in life which she could never have attained if she
had been honest.
She had wanted to change her nature to fall in with the
others who lived, although she knew she would always be a
stranger among them because she was of a different kind. She
had not been able to stand alone, a prisoner, so to say, of her
own nature. And her relations to those who were strange to
her innermost being—the son and the father—had been
unnatural and repulsive. In consequence of it her own inner
self was ruined; every fixed point in herself, to which she had
held on, gave way—crumbled to nothing. She felt as if she
were dissolving from within.
If Helge came, if she met him, she knew that the despair
and disgust of her own life would overwhelm her. She did not
know what would happen, but one thing was certain—she
could not face a repetition of the old scenes.
And Gunnar. All these weeks, while he had been begging
of her to be his, she had not made up her mind if she loved him
or not. He wanted her such as she was, and he vowed that he
could help her—build up again all that had been destroyed in
her.
Sometimes she wished that he would take her by force, so
that she need not choose. It did not matter what he said; she
knew that if she became his, the little pride she had left told
her that the responsibility was her own. She had to become
what she had once been—what he believed she had been and
could be again. Whether she cared or not, she had to clean
herself from all that soiled her now, bury in a new life
everything that had happened since she gave Helge Gram the kiss by
which she betrayed her faith and her whole life up to that
spring day on the Campagna.
Did she want to be his? Did she love him because he was
all that she had wished to be, because his whole being awoke
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