FEJEVARY:  But that’s rather general, and there isn’t much in it to give us self-confidence.  But when you think we have hands because ages back—­before life had taken form as man, there was an impulse to do what had never been done—­when you think that we have hands today because from the first of life there have been adventurers—­those of best brain and courage who wanted to be more than life had been, and that from aspiration has come doing, and doing has shaped the thing with which to do—­it gives our hand a history which should make us want to use it well.

SILAS:  (breathed from deep) Well, by God!  And you’ve known this all this while!  Dog-gone you—­why didn’t you tell me?

FEJEVARY:  I’ve been thinking about it.  I haven’t known what to believe.  This hurts—­beliefs of earlier years.

FELIX:  The things it hurts will have to go.

FEJEVARY:  I don’t know about that, Felix.  Perhaps in time we’ll find truth in them.

FELIX:  Oh, if you feel that way, father.

FEJEVARY:  Don’t be kind to me, my boy, I’m not that old.

SILAS:  But think what it is you’ve said!  If it’s true that we made ourselves—­made ourselves out of the wanting to be more—­created ourselves you might say, by our own courage—­our—­what is it?—­aspiration.  Why, I can’t take it in.  I haven’t got the mind to take it in.  And what mind I have got says no.  It’s too—­

FEJEVARY:  It fights with what’s there.

SILAS:  (nodding) But it’s like I got this (very slowly) other way around.  From underneath.  As if I’d known it all along—­but have just found out I know it!  Yes.  The earth told me.  The beasts told me.

GRANDMOTHER:  Fine place to learn things from.

SILAS:  Anyhow, haven’t I seen it? (to FEJEVARY) In your face haven’t I seen thinking make a finer face?  How long has this taken, Felix, to—­well, you might say, bring us where we are now?

FELIX:  Oh, we don’t know how many millions of years since earth first stirred.

SILAS:  Then we are what we are because through all that time there’ve been them that wanted to be more than life had been.

FELIX:  That’s it, Uncle Silas.

SILAS:  But—­why, then we aren’t finished yet!

FEJEVARY:  No.  We take it on from here.

SILAS:  (slowly) Then if we don’t be—­the most we can be, if we don’t be more than life has been, we go back on all that life behind us; go back on—­the—­

(Unable to formulate it, he looks to FEJEVARY.)

FEJEVARY:  Go back on the dreaming and the daring of a million years.

(After a moment’s pause SILAS gets up, opens the closet door.)

GRANDMOTHER:  Silas, what you doing?

SILAS:  (who has taken out a box) I’m lookin’ for the deed to the hill.

GRANDMOTHER:  What you going to do with it?