[HELEN and HOFFMANN exchange a look of infinite comprehension and laugh. Then, by a common impulse, they look at LOTH.
HOFFMANN
[To LOTH.] Rustic simplicity!
MRS. KRAUSE appears, incredibly overdressed. Silk and costly jewels. Her dress and bearing betray hard arrogance, stupid pride and half-mad vanity.
HOFFMANN
Ah, there is mama! Permit me to introduce to you my friend Dr. Loth.
MRS. KRAUSE
[Half-curtsies, peasant-fashion.] I take the liberty! [After a brief pause.] Eh, but Doctor, you mustn't bear me a grudge, no, you mustn't at all. I've got to excuse myself before you right away—[she speaks with increasing fluency]—excuse myself on account o' the way I acted a while ago. You know, y'understan', we' get a powerful lot o' tramps here right along … 'Tain't reasonable to believe the trouble we has with them beggars. And they steals exackly like magpies. It ain't as we're stingy. We don't have to be thinkin' and thinkin' before we spends a penny, no, nor before we spends a pound neither. Now, old Louis Krause's wife, she's a close one, worst kind you see, she wouldn't give a crittur that much! Her old man died o' rage because he lost a dirty little two-thousand, playin' cards. No, we ain't that kind. You see that sideboard over there. That cost me two hundred crowns, not countin' the freight even. Baron Klinkow hisself couldn't have nothin' better.
MRS. SPILLER has entered shortly after MRS. KRAUSE. She is small, slightly deformed and gotten up in her mistress's cast-off garments. While MRS. KRAUSE is speaking she looks up at her with a certain devout attention. She is about fifty-five years old. Every time she exhales her breath she utters a gentle moan, which is regularly audible, even when she speaks, as a soft—m.