But in some
mysterious way the fountainhead of your inspiration seemed to dry
up when I could no longer replenish it--or rather when you wanted
to show its independence of me. And at last both of us began to
lose ground. And then you looked for somebody to put the blame on.
A new victim! For you are weak, and you can never carry your own
burdens of guilt and debt. And so you picked me for a scapegoat
and doomed me to slaughter. But when you cut my thews, you didn't
realise that you were also crippling yourself, for by this time
our years of common life had made twins of us. You were a shoot
sprung from my stem, and you wanted to cut yourself loose before
the shoot had put out roots of its own, and that's why you
couldn't grow by yourself. And my stem could not spare its main
branch--and so stem and branch must die together.
TEKLA. What you mean with all this, of course, is that you have
written my books.
ADOLPH. No, that's what you want me to mean in order to make me
out a liar. I don't use such crude expressions as you do, and I
spoke for something like five minutes to get in all the nuances,
all the halftones, all the transitions--but your hand-organ has
only a single note in it.
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