TOM:  Claire—­stop this! (To HARRY) This is wrong.

CLAIRE:  (excitedly) No; I’m going on.  They have been shocked out of what they were—­into something they were not; they’ve broken from the forms in which they found themselves.  They are alien.  Outside.  That’s it, outside; if you—­know what I mean.

ELIZABETH:  (not shocked from what she is) But of course, the object of it all is to make them better plants.  Otherwise, what would be the sense of doing it?

CLAIRE:  (not reached by ELIZABETH) Out there—­(giving it with her hands) lies all that’s not been touched—­lies life that waits.  Back here—­the old pattern, done again, again and again.  So long done it doesn’t even know itself for a pattern—­in immensity.  But this—­has invaded.  Crept a little way into—­what wasn’t.  Strange lines in life unused.  And when you make a pattern new you know a pattern’s made with life.  And then you know that anything may be—­if only you know how to reach it. (this has taken form, not easily, but with great struggle between feeling and words)

HARRY:  (cordially) Now I begin to get you, Claire.  I never knew before why you called it the Edge Vine.

CLAIRE:  I should destroy the Edge Vine.  It isn’t—­over the edge.  It’s running, back to—­’all the girls’.  It’s a little afraid of Miss Lane, (looking sombrely at it) You are out, but you are not alive.

ELIZABETH:  Why, it looks all right, mother.

CLAIRE:  Didn’t carry life with it from the life it left.  Dick—­you know what I mean.  At least you ought to. (her ruthless way of not letting anyone’s feelings stand in the way of truth) Then destroy it for me!  It’s hard to do it—­with the hands that made it.

DICK:  But what’s the point in destroying it, Claire?

CLAIRE:  (impatiently) I’ve told you.  It cannot create.

DICK:  But you say you can go on producing it, and it’s interesting in form.

CLAIRE:  And you think I’ll stop with that?  Be shut in—­with different life—­that can’t creep on? (after trying to put destroying hands upon it) It’s hard to—­get past what we’ve done.  Our own dead things—­block the way.

TOM:  But you’re doing it this next time, Claire, (nodding to the inner room.) In there!

CLAIRE:  (turning to that room) I’m not sure.

TOM:  But you told me Breath of Life has already produced itself.  Doesn’t that show it has brought life from the life it left?

CLAIRE:  But timidly, rather—­wistfully.  A little homesick.  If it is less sure this time, then it is going back to—­Miss Lane.  But if the pattern’s clearer now, then it has made friends of life that waits.  I’ll know to-morrow.

ELIZABETH:  You know, something tells me this is wrong.

CLAIRE:  The hymn-singing ancestors are tuning up.

ELIZABETH:  I don’t know what you mean by that, mother but—­