LULU. If I'd wanted to sell my flowers this way before the Alhambra café, they'd have had me behind lock and key right off the very first night. ALVA. Why? You were a child! LULU. Do you remember me when I entered your room the first time? ALVA. You wore a dark blue dress with black velvet. LULU. They had to stick me somewhere and didn't know where. ALVA. My mother had been lying sick two years then. LULU. You were playing theater, and asked me if I wanted to play too. ALVA. To be sure! We played theater! LULU. I see you still--the way you shoved the figures back and forth. ALVA. For a long time my most terrible memory was when all at once I saw clearly into your relations-- LULU. You got icy curt towards me then. ALVA. Oh, God--I saw in you something so infinitely far above me. I had perhaps a higher devotion to you than to my mother. Think--when my mother died--I was seventeen--I went and stood before my father and demanded that he make you his wife on the spot or we'd have to fight a duel. LULU. He told me that at the time. ALVA. Since I've grown older, I can only pity him. He will never comprehend me. There he is making up a story for himself about a little diplomatic game that puts me in the rôle of laboring against his marriage with the Countess. LULU. Does she still look as innocently as ever at the world? ALVA. She loves him. I'm convinced of that. Her family has tried everything to make her turn back. I don't think any sacrifice in the world would be too great for her for his sake. LULU. (Holds out her glass to him.) A little more, please. ALVA. (Giving it to her.) You're drinking too much. LULU. He shall learn to believe in my success! He doesn't believe in any art. He believes only in papers. ALVA. He believes in nothing. LULU. He brought me into the theater in order that someone might eventually be found rich enough to marry me. ALVA. Well, alright. Why need that trouble us? LULU. I am to be glad if I can dance myself into a millionaire's heart. ALVA. God defend that anyone should take you from us! LULU. You've composed the music for it, though. ALVA. You know that it was always my wish to write a piece for you. LULU. I am not at all made for the stage, however. ALVA. You came into the world a dancer! LULU. Why don't you write your things at least as interesting as life is? ALVA. Because if we did no man would believe us. LULU. If I didn't know more about acting than the people on the stage do, what might not have happened to me? ALVA. I've provided your part with all the impossibilities imaginable, though. LULU. With hocus-pocus like that no dog is lured from the stove in the real world. ALVA. It's enough for me that the public finds itself most tremendously stirred up. LULU. But _I_'d like to find myself most tremendously stirred up. (Drinks.) ALVA. You don't seem to be in need of much more for that.