John. Don’t drink to such excess—you’ll get drunk!

Julie. What does it matter?

John. What does it matter? It’s cheap to get drunk. What do you want to say to me then?

Julie. We’ll run away, but we’ll talk first, that means I will talk, because up to now you’ve done all the talking yourself. You’ve told me about your life, now I’ll tell you about mine. Then we shall know each other thoroughly, before we start on our joint wanderings.

John. One moment. Excuse me, just think if you won’t be sorry afterward for giving away all the secrets of your life.

Julie. Aren’t you my friend?

John. Yes, for a short time. Don’t trust me.

Julie. You don’t mean what you say. Besides, everybody knows my secrets. Look here, my mother was not of noble birth, but quite simple, she was brought up in the theories of her period about the equality and freedom of woman and all the rest of it. Then she had a distinct aversion to marriage. When my father proposed to her, she answered that she would never become his wife, but—she did. I came into the world—against the wish of my mother so far as I could understand. The next was, that I was brought up by my mother to lead what she called a child’s natural life, and to do that, I had to learn everything that a boy has to learn, so that I could be a living example of her theory that a woman is as good as a man. I could go about in boys’ clothes. I learned to groom horses, but I wasn’t allowed to go into the dairy. I had to scrub and harness horses and go hunting. Yes, and at times I had actually to try and learn farm-work, and at home the men were given women’s work and the women were given men’s work—the result was that the property began to go down and we became the laughing-stock of the whole neighborhood.