GESCHWITZ. 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 alright,—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? RODRIGO. ALVA. I haven't heard what you were saying. ALVA. RODRIGO. I'd never have got my person mixed up in this plot if she hadn't kept tickling my bare pate, before her sentence. If only she doesn't start doing too much as soon as 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. RODRIGO. ALVA. I've been asking myself for a week whether a person who'd been sentenced to prison could still be made to go as the chief figure in a modern drama. ALVA. GESCHWITZ. If the man would only come, now! GESCHWITZ. RODRIGO. I've still got to redeem my properties out of the pawn-shop here, too. Six hundred kilos of the [Pg 9] 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 trowser's 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 with bow-legs; 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. A couple of years ago I was fined fifty marks at the Alhambra Theater, because people could see I had a few hairs on my chest, not enough to make a respectable tooth-brush! But the Fine Arts Minister opined that the little school-girls might lose their joy in knitting stockings
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