SILAS:  It’s the future’s, mother—­so’s we can know more than we know now.

GRANDMOTHER:  We know it now.  ’Twas then we didn’t know it.  I worked for that hill!  And I tell you to leave it to your own children.

SILAS:  There’s other land for my own children.  This is for all the children.

GRANDMOTHER:  What’s all the children to you?

SILAS:  (derisively) Oh, mother—­what a thing for you to say!  You who were never too tired to give up your own bed so the stranger could have a better bed.

GRANDMOTHER:  That was different.  They was folks on their way.

FEJEVARY:  So are we.

(SILAS turns to him with quick appreciation.)

GRANDMOTHER:  That’s just talk.  We’re settled now.  Children of other old settlers are getting rich.  I should think you’d want yours to.

SILAS:  I want other things more.  I want to pay my debts ’fore I’m too old to know they’re debts.

GRANDMOTHER:  (momentarily startled) Debts?  Huh!  More talk.  You don’t owe any man.

SILAS:  I owe him (nodding to FEJEVARY).  And the red boys here before me.

GRANDMOTHER:  Fiddlesticks.

FELIX:  You haven’t read Darwin, have you, Uncle Silas?

SILAS:  Who?

FELIX:  Darwin, the great new man—­and his theory of the survival of the fittest?

SILAS:  No.  No, I don’t know things like that, Felix.

FELIX:  I think he might make you feel better about the Indians.  In the struggle for existence many must go down.  The fittest survive.  This—­had to be.

SILAS:  Us and the Indians?  Guess I don’t know what you mean—­fittest.

FELIX:  He calls it that.  Best fitted to the place in which one finds one’s self, having the qualities that can best cope with conditions—­do things.  From the beginning of life it’s been like that.  He shows the growth of life from forms that were hardly alive, the lowest animal forms—­jellyfish—­up to man.

SILAS:  Oh, yes, that’s the thing the churches are so upset about—­that we come from monkeys.

FELIX:  Yes.  One family of ape is the direct ancestor of man.

GRANDMOTHER:  You’d better read your Bible, Felix.

SILAS:  Do people believe this?

FELIX:  The whole intellectual world is at war about it.  The best scientists accept it.  Teachers are losing their positions for believing it.  Of course, ministers can’t believe it.

GRANDMOTHER:  I should think not.  Anyway, what’s the use believing a thing that’s so discouraging?

FEJEVARY:  (gently) But is it that?  It almost seems to me we have to accept it because it is so encouraging. (holding out his hand) Why have we hands?

GRANDMOTHER:  Cause God gave them to us, I s’pose.