RODRIGO--I’ve still got to redeem my properties out of the pawn-shop here, too. Six hundred kilos of the best iron. The baggage-rate on ’em is always three times as much as my own ticket, so that the whole junket isn’t worth a trousers button. When I went into the pawn-shop with ’em, dripping with sweat, they asked me if the things were genuine!--I’d have really done better to have had the costumes made abroad. In Paris, for instance, they see at the first glance where one’s best points are, and bravely lay them bare. But you can’t learn that sitting cross-legged; it’s got to be studied on classically shaped people. In this country they’re as scared of naked skin as they are abroad of dynamite bombs. Two years ago at the Alhambra Theater I was stuck for a fifty-marks fine because people could see I had a few hairs on my chest, not enough to make a respectable toothbrush! But the Fine Arts Minister opined that the little schoolgirls might lose their joy in knitting stockings because of it; and since then I have myself shaved once a month. ALVA--If I didn’t need every bit of my creative power now for the “World-Conqueror,” I might like to test the problem and see what could be done with it. That’s the curse of our young literature: we’re so much too literary. We know only such questions and problems as come up among writers and cultured people. We cannot see beyond the limits of our own professional interests. In order to get back on the trail of a great and powerful art we must live as much as possible among men who’ve never read a book in their lives, who are moved by the simplest animal instincts in all they do. I’ve tried already, with all my might, to work according to those principles--in my “Earth-Spirit.” The woman who was my model for the chief figure in that, breathes to-day--and has for a year--behind barred windows; and on that account for some incomprehensible reason the play was only brought to performance by the Society for Free Literature. As long as my father was alive, all the stages of Germany stood open to my creations. That has been vastly changed. RODRIGO--I’ve had a pair of tights made of the tenderest blue-green. If =they= don’t make a success abroad, I’ll sell mouse-traps! The trunks are so delicate I can’t sit on the edge of a table in ’em. The only thing that will disturb the good impression is my awful bald head, which I owe to my active participation in this great conspiracy. To lie in the hospital in perfect health for three months would make a fat pig of the most run-down old hobo. Since coming out I’ve fed on nothing but Karlsbad pills. Day and night I have orchestra rehearsals in my intestines. I’ll be so washed out before I get across the frontier that I won’t be able to lift a bottle-cork.