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Cpuntess: Another call?
Prince: Announced by me.
Countess: Who is it?
Prince: Our son.
Countess: Are you?...... Your son is coming out here?
Prince: He’ll be here in half-an-bour at the latest.
Countess: say, Prince, are you joking?
Prince: Not at all. Hardly with a dead person.....
What do you imagine?
Countess: It is true? He's coming?
Prince: Yes.
Gountess: You seem to take it still as a caprice that
I don't want to know anything about the boy.
Prince? Caprice?........ No. There's too much conse¬
quence in it for a caprice... To think, that for all
these years you could refrain from even asking about him.
I’ve gone through
Countess: nothing particular about that.
harder things. When I had to give him up eight days after
he was born.
Prince: Yes, but else could you, could we do? What I
arranged- With your consent, in the end- was certainly the
wisest thing we could do in our situation.
Countess: The wisest, yes, I never doubted it.
Prince: Not only the wisest, Mizzi, You know, not only
Others might have been
our fate was to be considered,
ruined if the truth had been known. My wife, with her
awesk heart, would hardly have Coavited it.
Countess: Thatweak heart-
Prince: And your father, Mizzi, your father?
Countess: He would have come around at it, you may be sure.
At that time his little story with Lolo began, otherwise
it wouldn’t have been so easy. He would have bethered about
me a little more. I couldn’t have stayed away for months,
if it hadn’t been very convenient for him just then. There
was only one danger. That Fedor Wangenheim might have pos-
sibly shot you down, my dear Prince.
Prince: Why? It might have been the reverse, Or do you believe