want to see them! (Pause.) What one says is
mostly worthless. (Pause.) May I read them? No, I see I mayn't. You want
nothing more from me. (The LADY makes a gesture as if she were going to
speak.) Your face tells me enough. Now you've sucked me dry, eaten
me hollow, killed my ego, my personality. To that I answer: how, my
beloved? Have _I_ killed your ego, when I wanted to give you the whole
of mine; when I let you skim the cream off my bowl, that I'd filled with
all the experience of along life, with incursions into the deserts and
groves of knowledge and art?

LADY. I don't deny it, but my ego wasn't my own.

STRANGER. Not yours? Then what is? Something that belongs to others?

LADY. Is yours something that belongs to others too?

STRANGER. No. What I've experienced is my own, mine and no other's. What
I've read becomes mine, because I've broken it in two like glass, melted
it down, and from this substance blown new glass in novel forms.

LADY. But I can never be yours.

STRANGER. I've become yours.

LADY. What have you got from me?

STRANGER. How can you ask me that?

LADY. All the same--I'm not sure that you think it, though I feel you
feel it--you wish me far away.

STRANGER. I must be a certain distance from you, if I'm to see you. Now
you're within the focus, and your image is unclear.

LADY. The nearer, the farther off!

STRANGER. Yes. When we part, we long for one another; and when we meet
again, we long to part.

LADY. Do you really think we love each other?

STRANGER. Yes. Not like ordinary people, but unusual ones. We resemble
two drops of water, that fear to get close together, in case they should
cease to be two and become one.

LADY. This time we knew the dangers and wanted to avoid them. But it
seems that they can't be avoided.

STRANGER. Perhaps they weren't dangers, but rude necessities; laws
inscribed in the councils of the immortals. (Silence.) Your love always
seemed to have the effect of hate. When you made me happy, you envied
the happiness you'd given me. And when you saw I was unhappy, you loved
me.

LADY. Do you want me to leave you?

STRANGER. If you do, I shall die.

LADY. And, if I stay, it's I who'll die.

STRANGER. Then let's die together and live out our love in a higher
life; our love, that doesn't seem to be of this world. Let's live it out
in another planet, where there's no nearness and no distance, where two
are one; where number, time and space are no longe