CASTI-PIANI. You handed out the last bit of it to me yesterday.
LULU. If you're sure of that then I suppose it's so.
CASTI-PIANI. You're down on the bare ground, you and your writer.
LULU. Then why all the words?—If you want to have me for yourself you need not first threaten me with execution.
CASTI-PIANI. I know that. But I've told you more than once that you won't be my downfall. I haven't sucked you dry because you loved me, but loved you in order to suck you. Bianetta is more to my taste from top to bottom than you. You set out the choicest sweetmeats, and after one has frittered his time away at them he finds he's hungrier than before. You've loved too long, even for our present relations. With a healthy young man, you only ruin his nervous system. But you'll fit all the more perfectly in the position I have sought out for you.
LULU. You're crazy! Have I commissioned you to find a position for me?
CASTI-PIANI. I told you, though, that I was an appointments-agent.
LULU. You told me you were a police spy.
CASTI-PIANI. One can't live on that alone. I was an appointments-agent originally, till I blundered over a minister's daughter I'd got a position for in Valparaiso. The little darling in her childhood's dreams imagined the life even more intoxicating than it is, and complained of it to Mama. On that, they nabbed me; but by reliable demeanor I soon enough won the confidence of the criminal police and they sent me here on a hundred and fifty marks a month, because they were tripling our contingent here on account of these everlasting bomb-explosions. But who can get along on a hundred and fifty marks a month? My colleagues get women to support them; but, of course, I found it more convenient to take up my former calling again; and of the numberless adventuresses of the best families of the entire world, whom chance brings together here, I have already forwarded many a young creature hungry for life to the place of her natural vocation.
LULU. (Decisively.) I wouldn't do in that business.