Ilse.
One need only to look at you.——Were there any girls there?
Moritz.
Arabella, the beer nymph, an Andalusian. The landlord let all of us spend the whole night alone with her.
Ilse.
One only need look at you, Moritz!——I don't know what a katzenjammer's like. During the last carnival I went three days and three nights without going to bed or taking my clothes off. From the ball to the café, noon at Bellavista; evenings, Tingle-Tangle; night, to the ball. Lena was there, and the fat Viola.——The third night Heinrich found me.
Moritz.
Had he been looking for you?
Ilse.
He tripped over my arm. I lay senseless in the snow in the street.——That's how I went with him. For fourteen days I didn't leave his lodgings——a dreadful time! In the morning I had to throw on his Persian nightgown and in the evening go about the room in the black costume of a page; white lace ruffles at my neck, my knees and my wrists. Every day he photographed me in some new arrangement——once on the sofa as Ariadne, once as Leda, once as Ganymede, once on all fours as a feminine Nebuchadnezzar. Then he longed for murder, for shooting, suicide and coal gas. Early in the morning he brought a pistol into bed, loaded it full of shot and put it against my breast! A twitch and I'll pull!——Oh, he would have fired, Moritz, he would have fired!——Then he put the thing in his mouth like a blow-pipe.——That awoke the feeling of self-preservation. And then——brrr!——the shot might have gone through my spine.