TOM:  Claire!  That’s (choked) almost too much.

CLAIRE:  (one of her swift glances—­canny, almost practical) Well, I’m glad if it is.  How can I make it more? (but what she sees brings its own change) I know what it is you’re afraid of.  It’s because I have so much—­yes, why shouldn’t I say it?—­passion.  You feel that in me, don’t you?  You think it would swamp everything.  But that isn’t all there is to me.

TOM:  Oh, I know it!  My dearest—­why, it’s because I know it!  You think I am—­a fool?

CLAIRE:  It’s a thing that’s—­sometimes more than I am.  And yet I—­I am more than it is.

TOM:  I know.  I know about you.

CLAIRE:  I don’t know that you do.  Perhaps if you really knew about me—­you wouldn’t go away.

TOM:  You’re making me suffer, Claire.

CLAIRE:  I know I am.  I want to.  Why shouldn’t you suffer? (now seeing it more clearly than she has ever seen it) You know what I think about you?  You’re afraid of suffering, and so you stop this side—­in what you persuade yourself is suffering, (waits, then sends it straight) You know—­how it is—­with me and Dick? (as she sees him suffer) Oh, no, I don’t want to hurt you!  Let it be you!  I’ll teach you—­you needn’t scorn it.  It’s rather wonderful.

TOM:  Stop that, Claire!  That isn’t you.

CLAIRE:  Why are you so afraid—­of letting me be low—­if that is low?  You see—­(cannily) I believe in beauty.  I have the faith that can be bad as well as good.  And you know why I have the faith?  Because sometimes—­from my lowest moments—­beauty has opened as the sea.  From a cave I saw immensity.

  My love, you’re going away—­
  Let me tell you how it is with me;
  I want to touch you—­somehow touch you once before I die—­
  Let me tell you how it is with me. 
    I do not want to work,
  I want to be;
  Do not want to make a rose or make a poem—­
  Want to lie upon the earth and know. (closes her eyes)
  Stop doing that!—­words going into patterns;
  They do it sometimes when I let come what’s there. 
  Thoughts take pattern—­then the pattern is the thing. 
  But let me tell you how it is with me. (it flows again)
  All that I do or say—­it is to what it comes from,
  A drop lifted from the sea. 
  I want to lie upon the earth and know. 
  But—­scratch a little dirt and make a flower;
  Scratch a bit of brain—­something like a poem. (covering her face)
  Stop doing that.  Help me stop doing that!

TOM:  (and from the place where she had carried him)
  Don’t talk at all.  Lie still and know—­
  And know that I am knowing.