Loth.
MRS. KRAUSE
[_Half-curtsies, peasant-fashion._] I take the liberty! [_After a brief
pause._] Eh, but Doctor, you mustn't bear me a grudge, no, you mustn't at
all. I've got to excuse myself before you right away--[_she speaks with
increasing fluency_]--excuse myself on account o' the way I acted a while
ago. You know, y'understan', we' get a powerful lot o' tramps here right
along ... 'Tain't reasonable to believe the trouble we has with them
beggars. And they steals exackly like magpies. It ain't as we're stingy.
We don't have to be thinkin' and thinkin' before we spends a penny, no,
nor before we spends a pound neither. Now, old Louis Krause's wife, she's
a close one, worst kind you see, she wouldn't give a crittur that much!
Her old man died o' rage because he lost a dirty little two-thousand,
playin' cards. No, we ain't that kind. You see that sideboard over there.
That cost me two hundred crowns, not countin' the freight even. Baron
Klinkow hisself couldn't have nothin' better.
_MRS. SPILLER has entered shortly after MRS. KRAUSE. She is small,
slightly deformed and gotten up in her mistress's cast-off garments.
While MRS. KRAUSE is speaking she looks up at her with a certain
devout attention.
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