class="allsmcap">CASTI-PIANI. Believe me, for God's sake, I've got your last red cent! If we haven't left this house before eleven, you and your lot will be transported to-morrow in a police-car to Germany.

LULU. You can't give me up!

CASTI-PIANI. Do you think that would be the worst thing I can have done in my life?... I must, in case we go to-night, have just a brief word with Bianetta. (He goes into the card-room, leaving the door open behind him. Lulu stares before her, mechanically crumpling up the note that Rodrigo stuck into her hand, which she has held in her fingers thruout the dialog. Alva, behind the card-table, gets up, a bill in his hand, and comes into the salon.)

ALVA. (To Lulu.) Brilliantly! It's going brilliantly! Geschwitz is wagering her last shirt. Puntschu has promised me ten more Jungfrau-shares. Steinherz is making her little gains and profits. (Exit, lower right.)

LULU. I in a bordell?—(She reads the paper she holds, and laughs madly.)

ALVA. (Coming back with a cash-box in his hand.) Aren't you going to play, too?

LULU. Oh, yes, surely—why not?

ALVA. By the way, it's in the Berliner Tageblatt to-day that Alfred Hugenberg has hurled himself over the stairs in prison.

LULU. Is he too in prison?

ALVA. Only in a sort of house of detention. (Exit, rear. Lulu is about to follow, but Countess Geschwitz meets her in the door-way.)

GESCHWITZ. You are going because I come?

LULU. (Resolutely.) No, God knows. But when you come then I go.

GESCHWITZ. You have defrauded me of all the good things of this world that I still possessed. You might at the very least preserve the outward forms of politeness in your intercourse with me.

LULU. (As before.) I am as polite to you as to any other woman. I only beg you to be equally so to me.

GESCHWITZ. Have you forgotten the passionate endearments by which, while we lay together in the hospital, you seduced me into letting myself be locked into prison for you?

LULU. Well, why else did you bring me down with the cholera beforehand? I swore very different things to myself, even while it was going on, from what I had to promise you! I am shaken with horror at the thought that that should ever become reality!