MITCH: Come on, Duchess! You don’t have to put on an act with us!

LINDA [walking back to the window]: Oh, he works so hard, poor Jim! It’s pitiful how hard he works. And nothing ever comes of it! Nothing at all!

MITCH [harshly]: Just as I thought! He’s a ham! Come on, Duchess, pack up this new traveling bag and let’s get going!

LINDA: What on earth do you mean?

BABE: You know that you can get your old job back.

LINDA: You two must be crazy!

MITCH: You’re going out on tour with us, Duchess. Bergmann said so. He sent us out here to get you. All is forgiven, come home, he said!

LINDA: Give Mr. Bergmann my regrets. I’m not available this season—say—what do you all think I am? Do you think I’d walk out on Jim just because things are a little tough right now? I’m not any quitter!

BABE: You walked out on the show pretty quick!

LINDA [smiling]: I wasn’t in love with the show.

BABE: So you’re in love with this sap?

MITCH: Of course she ain’t. Not the Duchess. She always had too much sense. The smartest girl in the show, Bergmann used to say—

LINDA: I am in love with him! Of course I am. [She turns her back to them.] And if you’re going to talk about him like that—

MITCH [good-humoredly]: The same old Duchess! Always on the high horse about something—

BABE: Be sensible, kid—!

LINDA [seating herself on the couch]: Oh, it’s like the show business and everything else. You have to work your way up.

MITCH: Yeah, but in the show business even the back row hoofers get regular pay. What do you folks live off of, huh? Love and a dime?

LINDA [laughing]: Love and thirty cents!

BABE [sitting beside Linda]: Thirty cents!

LINDA: He gets thirty cents an hour posing at the art school where he used to study.

MITCH: Posies, posies, who will buy my posies?

LINDA: Once in a while he paints an advertising poster—that helps out some.

MITCH: Swell. You can give him a job some day painting your signs on Broadway!

BABE: And so that’s how you live? How do you do it, honey?

LINDA: I don’t know. Really I don’t. We just get along somehow. Oh, you needn’t feel so terribly sorry for me. I’ve changed. I’m not the girl that I used to be. Something has happened to me since I’ve been with Jim. Something terribly funny.

MITCH: I can see that!

LINDA: There’s something mysterious about this little place of ours—we call it our magic tower—when we’re in it together we’re perfectly happy. We haven’t a care in the world. You’d think that we were millionaires!

MITCH: Poor Duchess! She’s gone off her nut!

LINDA: You think I’m crazy?

MITCH: Crazy? I’ll say so! Bergmann’s little pet she was! He pays her fifty a week and like that [Snaps his fingers.] she walks out on the show! Marries a poor punk in a red beret. . . .