ELFRIEDE--I am sorry to say that for two whole years I did nothing but write and speak and speak and write, without ever working up courage to attack the white slave traffic directly, until finally the white slave traffic found a victim under my own roof, in my own family! CASTI-PIANI--If I am rightly advised, however, only your own papers, books, and magazines were to blame for this misfortune. Apparently you did not keep them carefully enough away from the young person for whose rescue you are here at this moment? ELFRIEDE--There you are absolutely right! I grieve to confess I cannot contradict you there! Night after night, when I had stretched under the bed-clothes, content with myself and the world, for a ten-hour sleep undisturbed by any earthly emotion, that seventeen-year-old girl crept into my study without my ever dreaming of it and glutted her love-starved imagination with the most seductive pictures of sensual pleasure, and the fearfullest vice, from my piles of books on the suppression of the white slave traffic. Silly goose that I was, in spite of my twenty-eight years, I never saw the next morning that the girl had sat up all night! I had never in my life known a sleepless night! When I went to work again in the morning I never once asked myself how my papers could have got into such atrocious confusion! CASTI-PIANI--If I mistake not, my dear young lady, the girl had been engaged by your parents to do the lighter housework? ELFRIEDE--To her destruction! Yes! Mama as well as Papa was enchanted with her propriety and modesty. To Papa, who is a ministerial official and a bureaucrat of the purest water, her presence in our house was like a sunbeam. At her sudden disappearance, Papa as well as Mama stopped calling my activities for the Union an old maid’s eccentricity. They called it an outright crime. CASTI-PIANI--The girl is the illegitimate child of a wash-woman?--Do you perhaps know who her father was? ELFRIEDE--No, I never asked her about that.--But pray who are you? How do you come to know all this? CASTI-PIANI--Hm--the girl had read in one of your Union’s publications that certain advertisements were published in the daily papers by which, under certain well-known false pretenses, the white-slavers decoyed young girls into their clutches in order to introduce them to the love-market. Accordingly, the girl looked up an insertion of that kind in the first paper that came to hand, and on finding one, wrote a very correct letter of application for the position falsely advertised in the insertion. In this way I made her acquaintance. ELFRIEDE--And you dare tell me that--with such cynicism! CASTI-PIANI--I dare tell you that, my dear young lady, with just such objectivity. ELFRIEDE--[_In the utmost excitement, with fists clenched._] So the monster who delivered up this girl to a life of shame was you!