Prince
Josephine, our life together will be exquisite. It will be as the lives of the Romans in Greece—a bacchanale of peculiar formalities. We will bury conscience in the poppy-haunted air of exhausting revelry. We will——
Duchess
O Charles, you talk exactly like those men who design my dresses, but look——
[Her eyes are riveted upon a curious cavalcade crossing from right to left of stage, first a very small house on wheels drawn by a large wolf-dog; at its side, walking, an old man, his head bent in deep thought. He wears the cap and gown of a doctor of philosophy. After him, with dark hair falling almost to the ground about her pallid face, is walking a girl of extraordinary beauty. She is looking rigidly ahead of her and is being guided by a white ribbon suspended from the back of the cart. A few paces behind her comes a sinuous, coffee-skinned slave girl with that erect majesty of one who has worn crowns or carried water pitchers through generations. Behind the slave follows the flute player, a mountebank, horribly twisted in some manner not visible in the twilight. The Prince, who has permitted the carriage to go by him in a wonderment intensified by the beauty of the blind girl, walks over to the mountebank.]
Prince [arrogantly]
Who are you all? What are you doing here?
[Instead of answering, the mountebank hastily puts his flute into his pocket and executes a handspring, the third taking him altogether behind the scene, while from the front of the cavalcade, comes a high, cracked voice in answer to the Prince's question.]
A Voice