PAULINE
Then my landlady c'n wait an' wait for me to-day. I'll jump into the
Landwehr canal an' drownd myself.
MRS. JOHN
Pauline! An' what for? What for, I'd like to know? Now you just listen to me for a speck of a minute, just for God's sake, for the teeniest speck of one an' pay attention to what I'm goin' to propose to you! You know yourself how I says to you, out on Alexander square, right by the chronomoneter—says I to you right out, as I was comin' out o' the market an' sees your condition with half an eye. He don't want to acknowledge nothin', eh? That's what I axed you right out!—That happens to many gals here, to all of 'em—to millions! An' then I says to you … what did I say? Come along, I says, an' I'll help you!
PAULINE
O' course, I don't never dare to show myself at home lookin' this way. Mother, she'd cry it out at the first look. An' father, he'd knock my head against the wall an' throw me out in the street. An' I ain't got no more money left neither—nothin' but just two pieces o' gold that I got sewed up in the linin' o' my jacket. That feller didn't leave me no crown an' he didn't leave me no penny.
MRS. JOHN
Miss, my husband, he's a foreman mason. I just wants you to pay attention … just for heaven's sake, pay attention to the propositions that I'm goin' to make to you. They'll help us both. You'll be helped out an' the same way I'll be. An' what's more, Paul, that's my husband, he'll be helped, because he'd like, for all the world, to have a child, an' our only one, little Adelbert, he went an' died o' the croup. Your child'll be as well taken care of as an own child. Then you c'n go an' you c'n look up your sweetheart an' you c'n go back into service an' home to your people, an' the child is well off, an' nobody in the world don't need to know nothin'.
PAULINE
I'll do it just outa spite—that's what! An' drownd myself! [She rises.] An' a note, a note, I'll leave in my jacket, like this: You drove your Pauline to her death with your cursed meanness! An' then I'll put down his name in full: Alois Theophil Brunner, instrument-maker. Then he c'n see how he'll get along in the world with the murder o' me on his conscience.