ELFRIEDE--[_Boiling over._] I won’t let you humbug me here any longer! I am firmly convinced that you have no serious intention of setting the girl free. While I play the fool here listening to your sociological lectures, the poor thing’ll be hustled into a cab somehow, packed off to the station and transported to some place where she’ll be safe all her life from members of the Union for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic.--Very well, I know what I have to do! [_Takes hat._] CASTI-PIANI--[_Smiling._] If you guessed, dear lady, how your outburst of rage beautified your bourgeois appearance, you would not be in such a hurry to depart. ELFRIEDE--Let me out! It’s high time! CASTI-PIANI--Where are you thinking of going now? ELFRIEDE--You know quite as well as I do where I am going now! CASTI-PIANI--[_Takes her by the throat, chokes her, and forces her into one of the chairs._] You’ll stay here. I’ve still got a word to say to you! Try to scream, go ahead, try it! We are accustomed here to every possible outcry. Shriek as loud as you can shriek!--[_Letting her go._] I shall be surprised if I don’t bring you to reason before you run straight from this house to the police! ELFRIEDE--[_Gasping, toneless._] It’s the first time in my life violence like that has been offered me! CASTI-PIANI--You have done so awfully much in your useless life for the uplift of the daughters of joy! Now for once do something useful for the uplift of =joy=! Then you needn’t feel sorry for the poor creatures any more. Because the joy-business is branded as the vulgarest, shamefullest of all professions, girls and women of good society give themselves to a man for nothing rather than let their favors be paid for! Thereby these girls and women degrade their sex in the same way as a tailor degrades his craft if he gives clothes to his customers for nothing! ELFRIEDE--[_Still as though stunned._] I don’t understand one word of all that! I went to school when I was five and stayed there till I was fourteen. Then I had to sit on a school-bench three more years before taking my teacher’s examinations. As long as I was young, our house was frequented by gentlemen of the best society. I had a proposal from one man who had inherited an estate of twenty square miles and who would have followed me to the ends of the world if I had wanted him to. But I felt I couldn’t love him. Perhaps it wasn’t right of me. Perhaps I was only lacking that minimum of passion which is essential to marriage under any circumstances. CASTI-PIANI--Have you calmed down at last? ELFRIEDE--Just explain one more thing to me. If the girl in the course of the life she’s living here, brings a child into the world, who will take care of that child?