IRA:  (the pent-up thing loosed) What has she to do with him?  She died so he could live.  He lives because she’s dead, (in anguish) And what is he alongside her?  Yes.  Something from far away.  Something from long ago.  Rare.  How’d you know that?  Finding in me—­what I didn’t know was there.  Then she came—­that ignorant Swede—­Emil Johnson’s mother—­running through the cornfield like a crazy woman—­’Miss Morton!  Miss Morton!  Come help me!  My children are choking!’ Diphtheria they had—­the whole of ’em—­but out of this house she ran—­my Madeline, leaving you—­her own baby—­running as fast as she could through the cornfield after that immigrant woman.  She stumbled in the rough field—­fell to her knees.  That was the last I saw of her.  She choked to death in that Swede’s house.  They lived.

MADELINE:  (going to him) Oh—­father, (voice rich) But how lovely of her.

IRA:  Lovely?  Lovely to leave you without a mother—­leave me without her after I’d had her?  Wasn’t she worth more than them.

MADELINE:  (proudly) Yes.  She was worth so much that she never stopped to think how much she was worth.

IRA:  Ah, if you’d known her you couldn’t take it like that.  And now you cry about the world!  That’s what the world is—­all coming to nothing.  My father used to sit there at the table and talk about the world—­my father and her father.  They thought ’twas all for something—­that what you were went on into something more than you.  That’s the talk I always heard in this house.  But it’s just talk.  The rare thing that came here was killed by the common thing that came here.  Just happens—­and happens cruel.  Look at your brother!  Gone—­(snaps his fingers) like that.  I told him not to go to war.  He didn’t have to go—­they’d been glad enough to have him stay here on the farm.  But no,—­he must—­make the world safe for democracy!  Well, you see how safe he made it, don’t you?  Now I’m alone on the farm and he—­buried on some Frenchman’s farm.  That is, I hope they buried him—­I hope they didn’t just—­(tormented)

MADELINE:  Oh, father—­of course not.  I know they did.

IRA:  How do you know?  What do you care—­once they got him? He talked about the world—­better world—­end war.  Now he’s in his grave—­I hope he is—­and look at the front page of the paper!  No such thing—­war to end war!

MADELINE:  But he thought there was, father.  Fred believed that—­so what else could he do?

IRA:  He could ‘a’ minded his own business.

MADELINE:  No—­oh, no.  It was fine of him to give his life to what he believed should be.