With Nora's own father ill and dying, she cannot ask him for the money; and even if convention would allow her to obtain gainful employment, the lack of necessary job skills, not to mention her advanced stage of pregnancy, prevents her from doing so. She must choose to either do nothing and watch Torvald die or defy his rule and secretly borrow the money. The rule that "a wife can[not] borrow without her husband's consent- (1.982) prevents Nora from obtaining a conventional loan, so she borrows from the unscrupulous Krogstad. Ignorant of simple legal and business knowledge, she compounds her problems by forging her father's signature on the bond. Nora naively believes that she is doing nothing wrong; necessity motivates her "to protect her dying father from worry and anxiety and to save her husband's life- (1.991). .
Having personally suffered the consequences of forging a signature, Krogstad uses Nora's crime to blackmail her and Torvald. Torvald quickly decides to meet Krogstad's demands because he realizes nobody will believe that Nora innocently forged the signature or that she, a mere woman, acted on her own; everyone will condemn her for her crime and suspect him of "be[ing] involved in [her] crooked dealings- (3.1019-1020). Rejecting Nora's noble motives as "silly excuses- (3.1019), Torvald admonishes Nora for her wrongdoing and declares that he is "brought so pitifully low all because of a shiftless woman- (3.1019).
After Krogstad withdraws his blackmail threat and returns Nora's bond, Torvald does not beg for Nora's forgiveness--instead, he forgives her. He acknowledges that what she did "was all for love of [him]- (3.1021) and that she "hadn't the experience to realize what [she was] doing- (3.1021). He declares that "[p]lay-time is over, now comes lesson-time [b]oth [her's] and the children's- (3.1023-1024). When Nora rejects his offer and tells him that she is leaving him to "educate [her]self- (3.