HARRY:  (nastily) There’s your egg, Edgeworth. (pointing to it on the floor) Claire decided it would be a good idea to smash everything, so she began with your egg.

TOM:  (looking at his egg) The idea of smashing everything is really more intriguing than an egg.

HARRY:  Nice that you feel that way about it.

CLAIRE:  (giving TOM his coffee) You want to hear something amusing? 
I married Harry because I thought he would smash something.

HARRY:  Well, that was an error in judgment.

CLAIRE:  I’m such a naive trusting person (HARRY laughs—­CLAIRE gives him a surprised look, continues simply).  Such a guileless soul that I thought flying would do something to a man.  But it didn’t take us out.  We just took it in.

TOM:  It’s only our own spirit can take us out.

HARRY:  Whatever you mean by out.

CLAIRE:  (after looking intently at TOM, and considering it) But our own spirit is not something on the loose.  Mine isn’t.  It has something to do with what I do.  To fly.  To be free in air.  To look from above on the world of all my days.  Be where man has never been!  Yes—­wouldn’t you think the spirit could get the idea?  The earth grows smaller.  I am leaving.  What are they—­running around down there?  Why do they run around down there?  Houses?  Houses are funny lines and down-going slants—­houses are vanishing slants.  I am alone.  Can I breathe this rarer air?  Shall I go higher?  Shall I go too high?  I am loose.  I am out.  But no; man flew, and returned to earth the man who left it.

HARRY:  And jolly well likely not to have returned at all if he’d had those flighty notions while operating a machine.

CLAIRE:  Oh, Harry! (not lightly asked) Can’t you see it would be better not to have returned than to return the man who left it?

HARRY:  I have some regard for human life.

CLAIRE:  Why, no—­I am the one who has the regard for human life, (more lightly) That was why I swiftly divorced my stick-in-the-mud artist and married—­the man of flight.  But I merely passed from a stick-in-the-mud artist to a—­

DICK:  Stick-in-the-air aviator?

HARRY:  Speaking of your stick-in-the-mud artist, as you romantically call your first blunder, isn’t his daughter—­and yours—­due here to-day?

CLAIRE:  I knew something was disturbing me.  Elizabeth.  A daughter is being delivered unto me this morning.  I have a feeling it will be more painful than the original delivery.  She has been, as they quaintly say, educated; prepared for her place in life.

HARRY:  And fortunately Claire has a sister who is willing to give her young niece that place.

CLAIRE:  The idea of giving anyone a place in life.

HARRY:  Yes!  The very idea!

CLAIRE:  Yes! (as often, the mocking thing gives true expression to what lies sombrely in her) The war.  There was another gorgeous chance.