John. Unfortunately the law does not provide any penalty for the woman who seduces a man.

Julie. [As before.] Can you find any other way out than that we should travel, marry and then get divorced again?

John. And if I refuse to take on the mesalliance?

Julie. Mesalliance?

John. Yes, for me. I’ve got better ancestors than you have: I haven’t got any incendiaries in my pedigree.

Julie. How do you know?

John. At any rate, you can’t prove the contrary, for we have no other pedigree than what you can see in the registry. But I read in a book on the drawing-room table about your pedigree. Do you know what the founder of your line was? A miller with whose wife the king spent a night during the Danish war. I don’t run to ancestors like that. I’ve got no ancestors at all, as a matter of fact, but I can be an ancestor myself.

Julie. This is what I get for opening my heart to a cad, for giving away my family honor.

John. Family shame, you mean. But, look here, I told you so; people shouldn’t drink, because then people talk nonsense, and people shouldn’t talk nonsense.

Julie. Oh, how I wish it undone, how I wish it undone! And if you only loved me!

John. For the last time—what do you want? Do you want me to cry, do you want me to jump over your riding whip, do you want me to kiss you, or tempt you away for three weeks by the Lake of Como, and then, what am I to do?—what do you want? The thing’s beginning to be a nuisance, but that’s what one gets for meddling in the private affairs of the fair sex. Miss Julie, I see you’re unhappy, I know that you suffer, but I can’t understand you. People like us don’t go in for such fairy tales; we don’t hate each other either. We take love as a game, when our work gives us time off, but we haven’t got the whole day and the whole night to devote to it. Let me look at you. You are ill; you are certainly ill!