LULU. How anxious at heart one gets when one hasn't seen herself for months! One day I got a brand-new dust-pan. When I swept up at seven in the morning I held the back of it up before my face. Tin doesn't flatter, but I took pleasure in it all the same.--Bring the picture down from your room. Shall I come too? ALVA. No, Heaven's sake! You must spare yourself! LULU. I've been sparing myself long enough now! (_Alva goes out, right, to get the picture._) He has heart-trouble; but to have to plague one's self with imagination fourteen months!... He kisses with the fear of death on him, and his two knees shake like a frozen vagabond's. In God's name.... In this room--if only I had not shot his father in the back! ALVA. (_Returns with the picture of Lulu in the Pierrot-dress._) It's covered with dust. I had leant it against the fire-place, face to the wall. LULU. You didn't look at it all the time I was away? ALVA. I had so much business to attend to, with the sale of our paper and everything. Countess Geschwitz would have liked to have hung it up in her house, but she had to be prepared for search-warrants. (_He puts the picture on the easel._) LULU. (_Merrily._) Now the poor monster is learning the joys of life in Hotel Ox-butter by her own experience. ALVA. Even now I don't understand how events hang together. LULU. Oh, Geschwitz arranged it all very cleverly. I must admire her inventiveness. But the cholera must have raged fearfully in Hamburg this summer; and on that she founded her plan for freeing me. She took a course in hospital nursing here, and when she had the necessary documents she journeyed to Hamburg with them and nursed the cholera patients. At the first opportunity that offered she put on the underclothes in which a sick woman had just died and which really ought to have been burnt. The same morning she traveled back here and came to see me in prison. In my cell, while the wardress was outside, we, as quick as we could, exchanged underclothes. ALVA. So that was the reason why the Countess and you fell sick of the cholera the same day! LULU. Exactly, that was it! Geschwitz of course was instantly brought from her house to the contagious ward in the hospital. But with me, too, they couldn't think of any other place to take me. So there we lay in one room in the contagious ward behind the hospital, and from the first day Geschwitz put forth all her art to make our two faces as like each other as possible. Day before yesterday she was let out as cured. Just now she came back and said she'd forgotten her watch. I put on her clothes, she slipped into my prison frock, and then I came away. (_With pleasure._) Now she's lying over there as the murderess of Dr. Schoen. ALVA. So far as outward appearance goes you can still agree with the picture as much as ever. LULU. I'm a little peaked in the face, but otherwise I've lost nothing. Only one gets incredibly nervous in prison. ALVA. You looked horribly sick when you came in.