RODRIGO--Hold my tongue? with a head as full of thoughts as mine is!--I absolutely can’t believe she’s changed so awfully much to her advantage there! GESCHWITZ--She is more glorious to look at than I have ever seen her! RODRIGO--God preserve me from founding my life-happiness upon =your= taste and judgment! If the disease has hit her as it has you, I’m smashed and thru! You’re leaving the contagious ward like a rubber-lady who’s had an accident and taken to hunger-striking. You can scarcely blow your nose any more. First you need a quarter-hour to sort your fingers, and then you have to be mighty careful not to break off the tip. GESCHWITZ--What puts =us= under the ground gives =her= health and strength again. RODRIGO--That’s all right and fine enough. But I don’t think I’ll be travelling off with her this evening. GESCHWITZ--You will let your bride journey all alone, after all? RODRIGO--In the first place, the old fellow’s going with her to protect her in case anything serious----My escort could only be suspicious. And secondly, I must wait here till my costumes are ready. I’ll get across the frontier soon enough all right,--and I hope in the meantime she’ll put on a little embonpoint, too. Then we’ll get married, provided I can present her before a respectable public. I love the practical in a woman: what theories they make up for themselves are all the same to me. Aren’t they to you too, Doctor? ALVA--I haven’t heard what you were saying. RODRIGO--I’d never have got my person mixed up in this plot at all if she hadn’t kept tickling my bare pate, before her sentence. If only she doesn’t start exercising again too hard the moment she’s out of Germany! I’d like best to take her to London for six months, and let her fill up on plum-cakes. In London one expands just from the sea air. And then, too, in London one doesn’t feel with every swallow of beer as if the hand of fate were at one’s throat. ALVA--I’ve been asking myself for a week now whether a person who’d been sentenced to prison could still be made to go as the chief figure in a modern drama. GESCHWITZ--If the man would only come, now!