-13-
, p. 1/3
1:4
her carriage and hold her off.
Countess: How childish. How touching, really. I should so
have like to meet her. Isn’t it too stupid. One has a father who
has spent half of his life with an understoodly very delightful
person...and one never has the opportunity--hasn’t the right--to
shake hands with her. Why doesn't it suit him? He must surely know
that I know everything.
Perhaps it would have dis¬
Prince: Lord, that’s how he is.
turbed him less if he had not expected another visit exactly at
this time...
Countess: Another visit?
Prince: Of which I took the liberty of informing him.
Countess: What visit?
Prince: Our son.
Countess: Are you...Your son is coming here?
Prince: In half an hour at the latest he will be here.
Countess: Tell me, Prince...Are you joking with me?
Prince: Most certainly not. With a dead...What do you
think?
Countess: Is it true? Is he coming here?
Prince: Yes.
Countess: Evidently you still consider it a whim on my
part that I want to know nothing of the boy?
You carry the thing out entirely
Prince: A whim..?
tooisonly for me to dare call it that. When I think that all
through these years you have not a single time allowed yourself to
ask about him...
Countess: That isn't anything to marvel at.
I have forced
myself to doennarder things. At that time, when I had to give him
up eight days after he came into the world.
Prince: Yes, at that time there remained nothing else for you,
remained nothing for us both to do. My arrangement, to which you
finally agreed, was decidedly the wisest that we, could make in
our situation.
Countess: Wisel that I have never doubted.
Prince: And not only wise, Mizzi. You know it was not
a question of our fate alone. It would perhaps have meant the ruin
of others too, if the truth had come to light. My wife with her
ailing heart would hardly have served it.
Countess: That ailing heart....