Yes, it's I. MELCHIOR. If I didn't know you were Wendla Bergmann, I would take you for a dryad, fallen out of your tree. WENDLA. No, no, I am Wendla Bergmann.----How did you come here? MELCHIOR. I followed my thoughts. WENDLA. I'm hunting waldmeister.[1] Mamma wants to make Maybowl. At first she intended coming along herself, but at the last moment Aunt Bauer dropped in, and she doesn't like to climb.----So I came by myself. MELCHIOR. Have you found your waldmeister? WENDLA. A whole basketful. Down there under the beach it grows as thick as meadow clover. Just now I am looking for a way out. I seem to have lost the path. Can you tell me what time it is? MELCHIOR. Just a little after half-past four. When do they expect you? WENDLA. I thought it was later. I lay dreaming for a long time on the moss by the brook. The time went by so fast, I feared it was already evening. MELCHIOR. If nobody is waiting for you, let us linger here a little longer. Under the oak tree there is my favorite place. If one leans one's head back against the trunk and looks up through the branches at the sky, one becomes hypnotized. The ground is warm yet from the morning sun.----For weeks I've been wanting to ask you something, Wendla. WENDLA. But I must be home at five o'clock. MELCHIOR. We'll go together, then. I'll take the basket and we'll beat our way through the bushes, so that in ten minutes we'll be on the bridge!----When one lies so, with one's head in one's hand, one has the strangest thoughts.---- (_Both lie down under the oak._) WENDLA. What do you want to ask me, Melchior? MELCHIOR. I've heard, Wendla, that you visit poor people's houses. You take them food and clothes and money also. Do you do that of your own free will, or does your mother send you? WENDLA. Mother sends me mostly. They are families of day laborers that have too many children. Often the husband can't find work and then they freeze and go hungry. We have a lot of things which were laid away long ago in our closets and wardrobes and which are no longer needed.----But how did you know it? MELCHIOR. Do you go willingly or unwillingly, when your mother sends you? WENDLA. Oh, I love to go!----How can you ask? MELCHIOR. But the children are dirty, the women are sick, the houses are full of filth, the men hate you because you don't work---- WENDLA. That's not true, Melchior. And if it were true, I'd go just the same! MELCHIOR. Why just the same, Wendla? WENDLA. I'd go just the same! It would make me all the happier to be able to help them. MELCHIOR. Then you go to see the poor because it makes you happy? WENDLA. I go to them because they are poor. MELCHIOR. But if it weren't a pleasure to you, you wouldn't go? WENDLA. Can I help it that it makes me happy? MELCHIOR.