rvant pays to my house. Your credit is
exhausted!

LULU. I can answer for my reckoning still for years. (Coming forward
from the stairs.) How do you like my new gown?

SCHOEN. Away with you, or my brains will give way to-morrow and my son
swim in his own blood! You infect me like an incurable pest in which I
shall groan away the rest of my life. I =will= cure myself! Do you
understand? (Pressing the revolver on her.) This is your physic. Don't
break down; don't kneel! You yourself shall apply it. You or I--which
is the weaker? (Lulu, her strength threatening to desert her, has sunk
down on the couch. Turning the revolver this way and that.)

LULU. It doesn't go off.

SCHOEN. Do you still remember how I tore you out of the clutches of the
police?

LULU. You have much confidence--

SCHOEN. Because I'm not afraid of a street-girl? Shall I guide your hand
for you? Have you no mercy towards yourself? (Lulu points the revolver
at him.) No false alarms! (Lulu fires a shot into the ceiling. Rodrigo
springs out of the portieres, up the stairs and away thru the gallery.)
What was that?

LULU. (Innocently.) Nothing.

SCHOEN. (Lifting the portieres.) What flew out of here?

LULU. You're suffering from persecution-mania.

SCHOEN. Have you got still more men hidden here? (Tearing the revolver
from her.) Is yet another man calling on you? (Going left.) I'll regale
your men! (Throws up the window curtains, flings the fire-screen back,
grabs Countess Geschwitz by the collar and drags her forward.) Did you
come down the chimney?

GESCHWITZ. (In deadly terror, to Lulu.) Save me from him!

SCHOEN. (Shaking her.) Or are you, too, an acrobat?

GESCHWITZ. (Whimpering.) You hurt me.

SCHOEN. (Shaking her.) Now you will =have= to stay to dinner. (Drags her
right, shoves her into the next room and locks the door after her.) We
want no town-criers. (Sits next Lulu and makes her take the revolver
again.) There's still enough for you in it. Look at me! I cannot assist
the coachman in my house to decorate my forehead for me. Look at me! I
pay my coachman. Look at me! Am I doing the coachman a favor when I
can't stand the stable-stench?

LULU. Have the carriage got ready! Please! We're going to the opera.

SCHOEN. We're going to the devil! Now I am coachman. (Turning the
revolver in her hand from himself to Lulu's breast.) Think you we let
ourselves be mistreated as you mistreat me, and hesitate between a
galley-slave's shame at