Act II is a capitally arranged interior of the inn, with the wooden shoes of the servant maid clopping around, where the inevitable happens. Hanna Elias, accompanied by a young Russian girl--whose German accent furnishes mild humour--promptly swoops down on the anaemic painter. There is brief resistance on his part. She tells him she can't, can't live without him--oh, thrice-familiar feminine music!--and with a double sob that shakes you in your seat the pair embrace. Curtain. The next act is frittered away in talk, the principal object seemingly to show how much the sculptor hates Hanna. In Act IV Gabriel is ill. He has had a fall, but it is really a heart attack. A doctor, an old friend, is summoned from a neighbouring island. Unfortunately Mrs. Schilling, the neglected wife is informed by the not very tactful doctor that her husband is ill. She rushes up from Berlin, and the best, indeed the only, dramatic scene then ensues. She is not permitted to see the sick man. She demands the reason. She is naturally not told, for Hanna is nursing him. She can't understand, and it is the difficult task of Lucie Heil, the violinist, to get her away before the fat is in the fire. Unfortunately, at that critical moment, Hanna Elias walks calmly from Gabriel's sleeping chamber. The row is soon on. Hanna was enacted by an emotional actress, Tilla Durieux, whose personality is forthright, whose methods are natural. (Her Hedda Gabler is strong.) She dressed the character after the approved Friedrichstrasse style. You must know that the artistic Bohemienne wears her hair plastered at the sides of her head a la Merode. The eyes are always "done up," the general expression suggested, if the lady is dark, being that of Franz von Stuck's picture, Sin. To look mysterious, sinister, exotic, ah! that appeals to the stout, sentimental German beer heroes of the opera, theatre, and studio. Fraeulein Durieux is entirely successful in her assumption of a woman who is "emancipated," who has thrown off the "shackles" of matrimony, who drinks beer in the morning, tea in the afternoon, coffee at night, and smokes cigarettes all the time. It is a pronounced type in Berlin. She talks art, philosophy, literature, and she daubs or plays or models. She is the best portrait in the play, though a thrice-familiar one. The poet showed this "misunderstood woman" in one of his early works, Before Sunrise.