egular meetings with her - always (wink, wink - from his side, not hers) within the boundaries of propriety. Hedda, more her father's daughter than an academic's wife, expresses her sense of enclosing captivity by taking potshots at Brack with a pair of hand-made pistols inherited from the General.
Simultaneously, THEA Elvsted appears at the household. Thea tells Tesman and Hedda of her concern for Lovborg, who, after years of dissipation, has written a brilliant book and is now returning to his former academic world to present it. She is worried, though, that Lovborg will return to his old, dissolute ways. Thea makes an appeal to Tesman to help keep the brilliant scholar in line; she is afraid of Hedda: as children the two-classes-older daughter of General Gabler was always contemptuous of the lower-middle-class Thea, threatening to "burn off her irritating hair that she was always showing off." (Hedda herself, described in terms of "refinement and distinction," is specifically aware of her own "hair of an agreeable medium brown, but not partic
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