MRS. JOHN wheels the perambulator behind the partition and reappears with a basin full of water, which she places on a chair.
HASSENREUTER
Did the lady, by any chance, belong to that international high society which we either regulate or segregate?
SPITTA
I confess that that was quite as indifferent to me in the given instance, as it was to one of the omnibus horses who held his left fore foot suspended in the air for five, six or, perhaps, even eight solid minutes, in order not to trample on the woman who lay immediately beneath it. [SPITTA is answered by a round of laughter.] You may laugh! The behaviour of the horse didn't strike me as in the least ludicrous. I could well understand how some people applauded him, clapped their hands, and how others stormed a bakery to buy buns with which to feed him.
MRS. JOHN
[Fanatically.] I wish he'd trampled all he could! [MRS. JOHN'S remark calls forth another outburst of laughter.] An' anyhow! That there Knobbe woman! She oughta be put in some public place, that she ought, publicly strapped to a bench an' then beaten—beaten—that's what! She oughta have the stick taken to her so the blood jus' spurts!
SPITTA
Exactly, I've never been deluded into thinking that the so-called Middle Ages were quite over and done with. It isn't so long ago, in the year eighteen hundred and thirty-seven, as a matter of fact, that a widow named Mayer was publicly broken on the wheel right here in the city of Berlin on Hausvogtei Square,—[He displays fragments of the lenses of his spectacles.] By the way, I must hurry to the optician at once.