LADY. But you've heard them.
STRANGER. That's nothing; I 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?