HARRY:  Claire!  What language you use!  A person knowing you only by certain moments could never be made to believe you are a refined woman.

CLAIRE:  True, isn’t it, Dick?

HARRY:  It would be a good deal of a lark to let them listen in at times—­then tell them that here is the flower of New England!

CLAIRE:  Well, if this is the flower of New England, then the half has never been told.

DICK:  About New England?

CLAIRE:  I thought I meant that.  Perhaps I meant—­about me.

HARRY:  (going on with his own entertainment) Explain that this is what came of the men who made the laws that made New England, that here is the flower of those gentlemen of culture who—­

DICK:  Moulded the American mind!

CLAIRE:  Oh! (it is pain)

HARRY:  Now what’s the matter?

CLAIRE:  I want to get away from them!

HARRY:  Rest easy, little one—­you do.

CLAIRE:  I’m not so sure—­that I do.  But it can be done!  We need not be held in forms moulded for us.  There is outness—­and otherness.

HARRY:  Now, Claire—­I didn’t mean to start anything serious.

CLAIRE:  No; you never mean to do that.  I want to break it up!  I tell you, I want to break it up!  If it were all in pieces, we’d be (a little laugh) shocked to aliveness (to DICK)—­wouldn’t we?  There would be strange new comings together—­mad new comings together, and we would know what it is to be born, and then we might know—­that we are.  Smash it. (her hand is near an egg) As you’d smash an egg. (she pushes the egg over the edge of the table and leans over and looks, as over a precipice)

HARRY:  (with a sigh) Well, all you’ve smashed is the egg, and all that amounts to is that now Tom gets no egg.  So that’s that.

CLAIRE:  (with difficulty, drawing herself back from the fascination of the precipice) You think I can’t smash anything?  You think life can’t break up, and go outside what it was?  Because you’ve gone dead in the form in which you found yourself, you think that’s all there is to the whole adventure?  And that is called sanity.  And made a virtue—­to lock one in.  You never worked with things that grow!  Things that take a sporting chance—­go mad—­that sanity mayn’t lock them in—­from life untouched—­from life—­that waits, (she turns toward the inner room) Breath of Life. (she goes in there)

HARRY:  Oh, I wish Claire wouldn’t be strange like that, (helplessly) What is it?  What’s the matter?

DICK:  It’s merely the excess of a particularly rich temperament.

HARRY:  But it’s growing on her.  I sometimes wonder if all this (indicating the place around him) is a good thing.  It would be all right if she’d just do what she did in the beginning—­make the flowers as good as possible of their kind.  That’s an awfully nice thing for a woman to do—­raise flowers.  But there’s something about this—­changing things into other things—­putting things together and making queer new things—­this—­