TESMAN.
[Filling the glasses.] Because I think it's such fun to wait upon you, Hedda.
HEDDA.
But you have poured out two glasses. Mr. Lovborg said he wouldn't have any — -
TESMAN.
No, but Mrs. Elvsted will soon be here, won't she?
HEDDA.
Yes, by-the-bye — Mrs. Elvsted — -
TESMAN.
Had you forgotten her? Eh?
HEDDA.
We were so absorbed in these photographs. [Shows him a picture.] Do you remember this little village?
TESMAN.
Oh, it's that one just below the Brenner Pass. It was there we passed the night — -
HEDDA.
— -and met that lively party of tourists.
TESMAN.
Yes, that was the place. Fancy — if we could only have had you with us, Eilert! Eh? [He returns to the inner room and sits beside BRACK.
LOVBORG.
Answer me one thing, Hedda — -
HEDDA.
Well?
LOVBORG.
Was there no love in your friendship for me either? Not a spark — not a tinge of love in it?
HEDDA.
I wonder if there was? To me it seems as though we were two good comrades — two thoroughly intimate friends. [Smilingly.] You especially were frankness itself.
LOVBORG.
It was you that made me so.
HEDDA.
As I look back upon it all, I think there was really something beautiful, something fascinating — something daring — in — in that secret intimacy — that comradeship which no living creature so much as dreamed of.
LOVBORG.
Yes, yes, Hedda! Was there not? — When I used to come to your father's in the afternoon — and the General sat over at the window reading his papers — with his back towards us — -
HEDDA.
And we two on the corner sofa — -
LOVBORG.
Always with the same illustrated paper before us — -
HEDDA.
For want of an album, yes.
LOVBORG.
Yes, Hedda, and when I made my confessions to you — told you about myself, things that at that time no one else knew! There I would sit and tell you of my escapades — my days and nights of devilment. Oh, Hedda — what was the power in you that forced me to confess these things?
HEDDA.
Do you think it was any power in me?
LOVBORG.
How else can I explain it? And all those — those roundabout questions you used to put to me — -
