GESCHWITZ. Then you cheated me consciously, deliberately?
LULU. (_Gaily._) What have you been cheated of, then? Your physical advantages have found so enthusiastic an admirer here, that I ask myself if I won't have to give piano lessons once more, to keep alive! No seventeen-year-old child could make a man madder with love than you, a pervert, are making him, poor fellow, by your shrewishness.
GESCHWITZ. Of whom are you speaking? I don't understand a word.
LULU. (_As before._) I'm speaking of your acrobat, of Rodrigo Quast. He's an athlete: he balances two saddled cavalry horses on his chest. Can a woman desire anything more glorious? He told me just now that he'd jump into the water to-night if you did not take pity on him.
GESCHWITZ. I do not envy you this cleverness with which you torture the helpless victims sacrificed to you by their inscrutable destiny. My own plight has not yet wrung from me the pity that I feel for you. _I_ feel free as a god when I think to what creatures *you* are enslaved.
GESCHWITZ. Casti-Piani, upon whose forehead the most degenerate baseness is written in letters of fire!
LULU. Be silent! I'll kick you, if you speak ill of *him*. He loves me with an uprightness against which your most venturous self-sacrifices are poor as beggary! He gives me such proofs of self-denial as reveal *you* for the first time in all your loathsomeness! You didn't get finished in your mother's womb, neither as woman nor as man. You have no human nature like the rest of us. The stuff didn't go far enough for a man, and for a woman you got too much brain into your skull. That's the reason you're crazy! Turn to Miss Bianetta! She can be had for everything for pay! Press a gold-piece into her hand and she'll belong to you. (_All the_ _company save Kadidia throng in out of the card-room._) For the Lord's sake, what has happened?
PUNTSCHU. Nothing whatever! We're thirsty, that's all.
MAGELONE. Everybody has won. We can't believe it.
BIANETTA. It seems I have won a whole fortune!
LUDMILLA. Don't boast of it, my child. That isn't lucky.
MAGELONE. But the bank has won, too! How is that *possible*?
ALVA. It is colossal, where all the money comes from!
CASTI-PIANI. Let us not ask! Enough that we need not spare the champagne.