CASTI-PIANI--One can’t live on that alone. I was an employment-agent originally, till I blundered over a minister’s daughter I’d got a position for in Valparaiso. The little darling in her childhood’s dreams had imagined the life to be even more intoxicating than it is, and complained about it to Mama. On that, they nabbed me; but by reliable demeanor I soon enough won the confidence of the criminal police and they sent me here on a hundred and fifty marks a month, because they were tripling our contingent here on account of these everlasting bomb-explosions. But who can get along in Paris on a hundred and fifty marks a month? My colleagues get women to support them; but, of course, I found it more convenient to take up my former calling again; and of the numberless adventuresses of the best families of the entire world, whom chance brings together here, I have already forwarded many a young creature hungry for life to the place of her natural vocation. LULU--[_Decisively._] I’m no good for that business. CASTI-PIANI--Your views on that question make no difference whatever to me. The department of justice will pay anyone who delivers the murderess of Dr. Schön into the hands of the police a thousand marks. I only need to whistle for the constable who’s standing down at the corner to have earned a thousand marks. Against that, the House of Oikonomopulos in Cairo bids sixty pounds for you--twelve hundred marks--two hundred more than the Attorney General. And, besides, I am still so far a friend of mankind that I prefer to help my loves to happiness, not hurl them into misery. LULU--[_As before._] The life in such a house can never in the world make a woman of my sort happy. When I was fifteen, I might have liked it. I was desperate then--thought I should never be happy. I bought a revolver, and ran one night barefoot through the deep snow over the bridge to the park to shoot myself there. But then by good luck I lay three months in the hospital without once getting sight of a man, and in that time my eyes were opened and I got to know myself. Night after night in my dreams I saw the man for whom I was created and who was created for me, so that when I was let out on the men again I was a silly goose no longer. Since then I can see on a man, in a pitch-dark night and a hundred feet away, whether we’re meant for each other; and if I sin against that insight I feel the next day dirtied, body and soul, and need weeks to get over the loathing I have for myself. And now you imagine I’ll give myself to every and any Tom and Harry!