Evening

Gretchen comes home thinking of the stranger from the street. She braids her hair, wonders who he was, decides he was from a noble house — otherwise he wouldn't have been so bold. She goes back out. Mephistopheles and Faust slip in through the door.

Faust stops in the middle of the room. The quiet orderliness of it moves him in a way the tavern and the witch's kitchen did not. A crucifix. A chest of drawers. A bed made with care. The textbooks of poverty and piety, the whole quiet life of a household. He calls it a shrine to holiness. He is aware that something in him that could not be satisfied by the spectacle of Auerbach's Cellar is being reached by this tiny room, and the speech he makes about it — about the spirit of contentment and order that reigns here — is one of the most tender in the play, and one of the most ironic, given what he is about to do.

Mephistopheles, meanwhile, has been opening cabinets. He brings out a casket of jewels and leaves it in Gretchen's chest of drawers as a gift from an unknown admirer. Gretchen returns, notices something not quite right in the room, opens the chest, and finds the casket. She opens it. The jewels glitter. She puts a necklace against herself at the mirror, not quite believing what she is seeing.