ers there are who can be but slowly known.
While to see you for a moment is to see perfect completeness
once and for ever.

Chitra

Alas, it is not I, not I, Arjuna! It is the deceit of a god.
Go, go, my hero, go. Woo not falsehood, offer not your great
heart to an illusion. Go.

SCENE III

Chitra

No, impossible. To face that fervent gaze that almost grasps you
like clutching hands of the hungry spirit within; to feel his
heart struggling to break its bounds urging its passionate cry
through the entire body--and then to send him away like a
beggar--no, impossible.

Enter MADANA and VASANTA.

Ah, god of love, what fearful flame is this with which thou hast
enveloped me! I burn, and I burn whatever I touch.

Madana

I desire to know what happened last night.

Chitra

At evening I lay down on a grassy bed strewn with the petals of
spring flowers, and recollected the wonderful praise of my beauty
I had heard from Arjuna;--drinking drop by drop the honey that I
had stored during the long day. The history of my past life like
that of my former existences was forgotten. I felt like a
flower, which has but a few fleeting hours to listen to all the
humming flatteries and whispered murmurs of the woodlands and
then must lower its eyes from the Sky, bend its head and at a
breath give itself up to the dust without a cry, thus ending the
short story of a perfect moment that has neither past nor future.

Vasanta

A limitless life of glory can bloom and spend itself in a
morning.

Madana

Like an endless meaning in the narrow span of a song.

Chitra

The southern breeze caressed me to sleep. From the flowering
Malati bower overhead silent kisses dropped over my body.
On my hair, my breast, my feet, each flower chose a bed to die
on. I slept. And, suddenly in the depth of my sleep, I felt as
if some intense eager look, like tapering fingers of flame,
touched my slumbering body. I started up and saw the Hermit
standing before me. The moon had moved to the west, peering
through the leav