The question resolves itself into this:
Has society, in its effort to uphold its moral standards, the right to
exact the sacrifice of life itself and every hope of happiness from the
victims of its own ignorance and injustice? When the young physician,
Edward Kallem, rescues the eighteen-year old Ragni Kule from the
degradation of her marriage to a husband afflicted with a most loathsome
disease, and afterward marries her--does he deserve censure or praise?
Bjoernson's answer is unmistakable. It is exactly the situation, depicted
five years later, by Madame Sarah Grand in the relation of Edith to the
young rake, Sir Moseley Menteith. Only, Bjoernson rescues the victim,
while the author of "The Heavenly Twins" makes her perish. In both
instances it is the pious ignorance of clerical parents which
precipitates the tragedy. Ragni's deliverance is, however, only an
apparent one. Society, which without indignation had witnessed her sale
to the corrupt old libertine, is frightfully shocked by her marriage to
Dr.
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