ression is my awful bald
head, which I owe to my active participation in this great
conspiracy. To lie in the hospital in perfect health for three months
would make a fat pig of the most run-down old hobo. Since coming out
I've fed on nothing but Karlsbad pills. Day and night I have
orchestra rehearsals in my intestines. I'll be so washed out before I
get across the frontier that I won't be able to lift a bottle-cork.

GESCHWITZ. How the attendants in the hospital got out of her way
yesterday! That was a refreshing sight. The garden was still as the
grave: in the loveliest noon sunlight the convalescents didn't
venture out of doors. Away back by the contagious ward she stepped
out under the mulberry trees and swayed on her ankles on the gravel.
The door-keeper had recognized me, and a young doctor who met me in
the corridor shrunk up as tho a revolver shot had struck him. The
Sisters vanished into the big rooms or stayed stuck against the
walls. When I came back there was not a soul to be seen in the garden
or at the gate. No better chance could have been found, if we had had
the cursed passports. And now the fellow says he isn't going with
her!

RODRIGO. I understand the poor hospital-brothers. One has a bad foot
and another has a swollen cheek, and there appears in the midst of
them the incarnate death-insurance-agentess! In the Hall of the
Knights, as the blessed division was called from which I organized my
spying, when the news got around there that Sister Theophila had
departed this life, not one of the fellows could be kept in bed. They
scrambled up to the window-bars, if they had to drag their pains
along with them by the hundred-weight. I never heard such swearing in
my life!

ALVA. Allow me, Fraulein von Geschwitz, to come back to my
proposition once more. Tho my father was shot in this room, still I
can see in the murder, as in the punishment, nothing but a horrible
misfortune that has befallen *her*; nor do I think that my father, if
he had come through alive, would have withdrawn his support from her
entirely. Whether your plan for freeing her will succeed still seems
to me very doubtful, tho I wouldn't like to discourage you; but I can
find no words to express the admiration with which your
self-sacrifice, your energy, your superhuman scorn of death, inspires
me. I don't believe any man ever risked so much for a woman, let
alone for a friend. I am not aware, Fraulein von Geschwitz, how rich
you are, b