.

MICHAELIS.

The world _is_ a very strange place.

_Pause._

RHODA.

Tell me a little about your life. That seems to have been very strange.

MICHAELIS.

_Vaguely, as he seats himself by the table._

I don't know. I can hardly remember what my life was.

RHODA.

Why is that?

MICHAELIS.

_Gazing at her._

Because, since I came into this house, I have seen the vision of
another life.

RHODA.

_With hesitation._

What--other life?

MICHAELIS.

Since my boyhood I have been--

_He hesitates._

I have been a wanderer, almost a fugitive--. And I never knew it, till
now--I never knew it till--I looked into your face!

RHODA.

_Avoiding his gaze._

How should that make you know?

MICHAELIS.

_Leans nearer._

All my life long I have walked in the light of something to come, some
labor, some mission, I have scarcely known what--but I have risen with
it and lain down with it, and nothing else has existed for me.--Nothing,
until--I lifted my eyes and you stood there. The stars looked down from
their places, the earth wheeled on among the stars. Everything was as
it had been, and nothing was as it had been; nor ever, ever can it be
the same again.

RHODA.

_In a low and agitated voice._

You must not say these things to me. You are--I am not--. You must not
think of me so.

MICHAELIS.

I must think of you as I must.

_Pause. Rhoda speaks in a lighter tone, as if to relieve the
tension of their last words._

RHODA.

Tell me a little of your boyhood.--What was it like--that place where
you lived?

MICHAELIS.

_Becomes absorbed in his own mental pictures as he speaks._

A great table of stone, rising five hundred feet out of the endless
waste of sand. A little adobe house, halfway up the mesa, with the
desert far below and the Indian village far above. A few peach trees,
and a spring--a sacred spring, which the Indians worshipped in secret.
A little chapel, which my father had built with his own hands. He often
spent the night there, praying. And there, one night, he died. I found
him in the morning, lying as if in quiet prayer before the altar.

RHODA.

_After a moment's hush._

What did you do after your father died?

MICHAELIS.

I went away south, into the mountains, and got work on a sheep range. I
was a shepherd for five years.

RHODA.

And since then?

MICHAELIS.

_Hesitates._

Since then I have--wander