MADELINE:  I’m—­all right.

HOLDEN:  Many happy returns of the day. (embarrassed by her half laugh)
The birthday.

AUNT ISABEL:  And did you have a nice look up the river?

HOLDEN:  I never saw this country as lovely as it is to-day.  Mary is just drinking it in.

AUNT ISABEL:  You don’t think the further ride will be too much?

HOLDEN:  Oh, no—­not in that car.

AUNT ISABEL:  Then we’ll go on—­perhaps as far as Laughing Creek.  If you two decide on a tramp—­take that road and we’ll pick you up. (smiling warmly, she goes out)

HOLDEN:  How good she is.

MADELINE:  Yes.  That’s just the trouble.

HOLDEN:  (with difficulty getting past this) How about a little tramp? 
There’ll never be another such day.

MADELINE:  I used to tramp with Fred Jordan.  This is where he is now. (stepping inside the cell) He doesn’t even see out.

HOLDEN:  It’s all wrong that he should be where he is.  But for you to stay indoors won’t help him, Madeline.

MADELINE:  It won’t help him, but—­today—­I can’t go out.

HOLDEN:  I’m sorry, my child.  When this sense of wrongs done first comes down upon one, it does crush.

MADELINE:  And later you get used to it and don’t care.

HOLDEN:  You care.  You try not to destroy yourself needlessly. (he turns from her look)

MADELINE:  Play safe.

HOLDEN:  If it’s playing safe it’s that one you love more than yourself be safe.  It would be a luxury to—­destroy one’s self.

MADELINE:  That sounds like Uncle Felix. (seeing she has hurt him, she goes over and sits across from him at the table) I’m sorry.  I say the wrong things today.

HOLDEN:  I don’t know that you do.

MADELINE:  But isn’t uncle funny?  His left mind doesn’t know what his right mind is doing.  He has to think of himself as a person of sentiment—­idealism, and—­quite a job, at times.  Clever—­how he gets away with it.  The war must have been a godsend to people who were in danger of getting on to themselves.  But I should think you could fool all of yourself all the time.

HOLDEN:  You don’t. (he is rubbing his hand on the table)

MADELINE:  Grandfather Morton made this table.  I suppose he and Grandfather Fejevary used to sit here and talk—­they were great old pals. (slowly HOLDEN turns and looks out at the hill) Yes.  How beautiful the hill must have been—­before there was a college there. (he looks away from the hill) Did you know Grandfather Morton?

HOLDEN:  Yes, I knew him. (speaking of it against his will) I had a wonderful talk with him once; about Greece—­and the cornfields, and life.

MADELINE:  I’d like to have been a pioneer!  Some ways they had it fierce, but think of the fun they had!  A whole big land to open up!  A big new life to begin! (her hands closing in from wideness to a smaller thing) Why did so much get shut out?  Just a little way back—­anything might have been.  What happened?