How good and generous you are!... How reassuring and comforting your presence and your smile!... Those others ... if you only knew!... They were trembling like the reeds of which our Master speaks; and I was helpless and dying with shame.... But I knew that you would come back to us; and now this is you, your arms, your breast.... It seems to me that Rome in her entirety is protecting us and that your arms, which can do all things, cannot abandon him....
Verus
They will not abandon you, Magdalene. The rest depends upon yourself alone.... I am good and generous, perhaps, but in my own manner; and we must understand each other.... So they have arrested him in whom you take so lively an interest, as I told you that they would?...
Mary Magdalene
They have not only arrested him: all the menials of the Temple, the grooms, the herds, the meanest scullions in the kitchens rushed at him, insulted, flouted and ill-treated him.... And, as they were afraid, as they were too cowardly to venture it alone, they made the Roman soldiers help them!...
Verus
I know.... But had we not best be brief and to the point?...
Mary Magdalene
Yes, we have no time to lose....
Verus