ESCERNY--[_Disconcerted._] Among men of culture you will not find one who can help losing his head over you. LULU--Your wishes, however, no one can quite fulfil without deceiving you. ESCERNY--To be deceived by a girl like you must be ten times more enrapturing than to be uprightly loved by anybody else. LULU--You have not known what it was to be uprightly loved by any girl yet in all your life! [_Turning her back to him and pointing._] Would you undo this knot for me? I’ve laced myself too tight. I am always so excited getting dressed. ESCERNY--[_After repeated efforts._] I’m sorry; I can’t. LULU--Then leave it. Perhaps I can. [_Goes left._] ESCERNY--I confess that I am lacking in deftness. Maybe I was a poor student in my relations with women. LULU--And probably you don’t have much opportunity in Africa, either? ESCERNY--[_Seriously._] Let me confess to you frankly that my isolation in the world embitters many an hour. LULU--The knot is almost done.... ESCERNY--What draws me to you is not your dancing. It’s your physical and spiritual refinement, as revealed in every one of your movements. No one who takes the interest I do in works of art could be deceived as to that. For ten evenings I’ve been studying your spiritual life in your dance, until to-day when you entered as the flower-girl I became perfectly clear. Yours is a grand nature--unselfish; you can see no one suffer; you embody the joy of life. As a wife you will make a man happy above all things.... You are all open-heartedness. You would be a poor actor. [_The bell rings again._] LULU--[_Having somewhat loosened her laces, takes a deep breath and jingles her spurs._] Now I can breathe again. The curtain is going up. [_She takes from the centre table a skirt-dance costume--of bright yellow silk, without a waist, closed at the neck, reaching to the ankles, with wide, loose sleeves--and throws it over her._] I must dance. ESCERNY--[_Rises and kisses her hand._] Allow me to remain here a little while longer. LULU--Please stay. ESCERNY--I need a little solitude. [LULU _goes out_.] What is to be aristocratic? To be eccentric, like me? Or to be perfect in body and mind, like this girl? [_Applause and bravos outside._] She gives me back my faith in humanity,--gives me back my life. Should not this woman’s children be more princely, body and soul, than children whose mother has no more vitality in her than I have felt in me until to-day? [_Sitting, right; ecstatically._] The dance has ennobled her body.... [ALVA _enters_.] ALVA--One is never sure a moment that some miserable chance won’t throw the whole performance out for good. [_He throws himself into the big chair, left, so that the two men are in exactly reversed positions from their former ones. Both converse somewhat boredly and apathetically._] ESCERNY--But the audience has never shown itself so responsive before. ALVA--She’s finished the skirt-dance. ESCERNY--I hear her coming....