ALVA. My mother had been lying sick two years then.
LULU. You were playing theater, and asked me if I wanted to play too.
ALVA. To be sure! We played theater!
LULU. I see you still—the way you shoved the figures back and forth.
ALVA. For a long time my most terrible memory was when all at once I saw clearly into your relations—
LULU. You got icy curt towards me then.
ALVA. Oh, God—I saw in you something so infinitely far above me. I had perhaps a higher devotion to you than to my mother. Think—when my mother died—I was seventeen—I went and stood before my father and demanded that he make you his wife on the spot or we'd have to fight a duel.
LULU. He told me that at the time.
ALVA. Since I've grown older, I can only pity him. He will never comprehend me. There he is making up a story for himself about a little diplomatic game that puts me in the rôle of laboring against his marriage with the Countess.
LULU. Does she still look as innocently as ever at the world?