LULU--He doesn’t seem to have noticed at all how cleverly you have deployed your performers. ALVA--I won’t blow in sun, moon and stars in the first act! LULU--[_Sipping._] You disclose me by degrees. ALVA--And I was well aware that you knew all about changing costumes. LULU--If I’d tried to sell my flowers =so= before the Alhambra café, they’d have had me behind lock and key right off the very first night. ALVA--Why? You were a child! LULU--Do you remember how I looked the first time I came into your room? ALVA--You wore a dark blue dress with black velvet. LULU--They had to stick me somewhere and didn’t know where. ALVA--My mother had been lying sick for two years already then. LULU--You were playing theater, and asked me if I wanted to play, too. ALVA--To be sure! We played theater! LULU--I see you still--the way you shoved the figures back and forth. ALVA--For a long time my most terrible memory was when all at once I saw clearly into your relations---- LULU--You got icy curt towards me then. ALVA--Oh, God-- I saw in you something so infinitely far above me. I had perhaps more veneration for you than for my mother. Think--when my mother died--I was seventeen--I went and stood before my father and demanded that he make you his wife on the spot or we’d have to fight a duel. LULU--He told me that at the time. ALVA--Since I’ve grown older, I can only pity him. He will never comprehend me. There he is making up a story for himself about a little diplomatic game that puts me in the rôle of laboring against his marriage with the Countess. LULU--Does she still look out upon the world as innocently as ever? ALVA--She loves him. I’m convinced of that. Her family has done everything to induce her to turn back. I don’t think any sacrifice in the world would be too great for her to make for his sake. LULU--[_Holds out her glass to him._] A little more, please. ALVA--[_Giving it to her._] You’re drinking too much. LULU--He shall learn to believe in my success! He doesn’t believe in art at all. He only believes in newspapers. ALVA--He believes in nothing. LULU--He brought me into the theater so that eventually someone might be found rich enough to marry me. ALVA--Well, all right. Why need that trouble us? LULU--I am to feel pleased if I can dance myself into a millionaire’s heart. ALVA--God forbid that anyone should snatch you from us! LULU--You’ve composed the music for it, tho. ALVA--You know that it was always my desire to write a piece for you. LULU--I am not at all suited to the stage, however. ALVA--You came into the world a dancer! LULU--Then why don’t you make your pieces as interesting as life is, at least? ALVA--Because if we did no man would believe us. LULU--If I hadn’t known more about acting than people on the stage pretend to, what might not have happened to me? ALVA--I provided your part with all the impossibilities imaginable, though. LULU--Nobody in the real world is taken in by hocus-pocus like that.