LUCREZIA. Ah, I should like to see your mother. I should like to ask her to give me some hints on how to bring up children.
WAITER. But surely, Signorina, you are not expecting, you—ah....
LUCREZIA. Only figuratively, Giuseppe. My children are spiritual children.
WAITER. Precisely, precisely. My mother, alas! is not a spiritual relation. Nor is my fiançée.
LUCREZIA. I didn't know you were engaged.
WAITER. To an angel of perdition. Believe me, Signorina, I go to my destruction in that woman—go with open eyes. There is no escape. She is what is called in the Holy Bible (crosses himself) a Fisher of Men.
LUCREZIA. You have remarkable connections, Giuseppe.
WAITER. I am honoured by your words, Signorina. But the coffee becomes cold. (He hurries out to the left.)
LUCREZIA. In the garden! By the fountain! And there's the nightingale beginning to sing in earnest! Good heavens! what may not already have happened? (She runs out after the waiter.)
(Two persons emerge from the hotel, the VICOMTE DE BARBAZANGE and the BARONESS KOCH DE WORMS. PAUL DE BARBAZANGE is a young man—twenty-six perhaps of exquisite grace. Five foot ten, well built, dark hair, sleek as marble, the most refined aristocratic features, and a monocle, SIMONE DE WORMS is forty, a ripe Semitic beauty. Five years more and the bursting point of overripeness will have been reached. But now, thanks to massage, powerful corsets, skin foods, and powder, she is still a beauty—a beauty of the type Italians admire, cushioned, steatopygous. PAUL, who has a faultless taste in bric-à-brac and women, and is by instinct and upbringing an ardent anti-Semite, finds her infinitely repulsive. The Baronne enters with a loud shrill giggle. She gives PAUL a slap with her green feather fan.)