The girl kneels before the prince. He takes the wreath from her hands, places it on her head, and asks her to rise. "Rise, my child," he says, "you must not kneel before me, but I shall kneel before you. I do not want to ask your name, for I know you, though I have never seen you, or heard anything about you." He begs her to ask a favour of him. She asks him to buy her flowers. Eric takes a ring off his finger, and gives it to the girl. She dare not wear it, and returns it. She leaves them, and Eric asks Göran if he has not seen the marvellous apparition, heard the wonderful voice. Göran has heard nothing but the voice of a common lass, a little cheeky. _Prince Eric_. Hold your tongue, Göran, I love her. _Göran Persson_. She is not the first one. _Prince Eric_. Yes, the first one, the only one. _Göran Persson_. Well, seduce her then. _Prince Eric_ (_draws his sword_). Take care, or by God---- _Göran Persson_. Is he going to prick me now again? _Prince Eric_. I do not know what has happened, but from this moment I detest you; I cannot live in the same town as you; you pollute me with your eyes, your whole being stinks. Therefore I leave you, and never want to see you before my face again. I leave you as if an angel had come to fetch me from the dwellings of the wicked; I detest the past, as I detest you and myself. (_Follows Karin_.) Though Strindberg shows an understanding of love's miracles--with which he is not generally credited--he makes no attempt to endow the first meeting between Eric and the peasant girl who became the mother of his children, and finally his queen, with a greater transfiguring power than it possessed. Here, as in all his historical dramas, he writes with the sense of the importance of the infinitely small, with the knowledge that "characters" and events arise out of the mind's contact with things that seem insignificant to the superficial observer. The wooden rigidity which the ordinary historian gives to the figures of the past, is the result of the incapacity to visualise the daily, the commonplace, in lives lived long ago. Strindberg's psychological conception of characters of the past is based on an almost microscopical power of seeing details. His own hypersensitive emotional memory initiated him into the manner, in which history is made by mood and temper, aches and pains--as well as by deliberate purpose of will and political programmes. Whether it be true or not that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was due to the toothache of Louis XIV, and that history was thus made by the ill-timed activity of molar nerves, psychological research into the origin of great events on the world's stage would reveal causes which the historian does not deign to consider.