OTTO--I’m going home. GEORGE--I, too, home to work! ERNEST--Me, too; me, too. ROBERT--Good night, Melchior. MELCHIOR--Sleep well!... [_All make off except_ MORITZ.] Gosh, I’d like to know what we’re in the world for! MORITZ--School makes me wish I’d been a cabhorse sooner!--What do we go to school for? So that somebody can examine us. And what are we examined for? To make us flunk! Seven of us have got to flunk just because the classroom upstairs only holds sixty.--I’ve felt so queer since Christmas! Devil take me, if it weren’t for Papa I’d tie up my bundle this very night and be off to Altoona! MELCHIOR--Let’s talk about something else. [_They go for a walk._] [In practice, MELCHIOR can here fling himself down on the bench; MORITZ remain standing.] MORITZ--Do you see the black cat there with its tail stuck up? MELCHIOR--Do you believe in omens? MORITZ--I don’t quite know.--It came from over there.--Means nothing! MELCHIOR--I believe that’s a Charybdis everyone falls into who has struggled up out of the Scylla of religious nonsense. Let’s sit down under this beech. The warm spring wind is streaming over the mountains. I’d like to be a young Dryad in the woods up there letting herself be rocked and swung in the highest tree-tops all night long to-night.... MORITZ--Unbutton your vest, Melchior. MELCHIOR--Ah, how it blows through one’s clothes! MORITZ--It’s getting so jolly dark you can’t see your hand before your face. Where are you? [_He draws_ MELCHIOR _down beside him. Only their voices, from here on, come out of the darkness._] Don’t you believe too, Melchior, that modesty in people is just the effect of their bringing-up? MELCHIOR--I started thinking about that just the day before yesterday. No, after all it seems to me to be deeply rooted in human nature. Imagine undressing completely before even your best friend! You wouldn’t do it unless he did it, too, at the same time. But it’s also more or less a matter of custom. MORITZ--I’ve sometimes thought, if I have children, boys and girls, right from the start I’ll have them sleep together in the same room--if possible, on the same bed--and help each other twice a day to dress and undress,--and on hot days, boys and girls alike, let ’em wear nothing at all but a short tunic, white woolen with just a leather belt. It seems to me, if they grew up so, they’d surely, later, be more at ease than we are, usually.... MELCHIOR--Oh, I’m sure of that, Moritz!--The only question is, what if the girls should have children? MORITZ--How do you mean--have children? MELCHIOR--I believe there’s a kind of instinct in that matter. I believe, for instance, if you shut up a pair of kittens, male and female, and cut them off from any contact with the outer world--left them absolutely to their own impulses, that is--well, the female sooner or later would get pregnant, though neither she nor the male had anyone to imitate or show them how.