EVE.  Keep a guard on your own tongue; and do not curse my son.  It was Lilith who did wrong when she shared the labor of creation so unequally between man and wife.  If you, Cain, had had the trouble of making Abel, or had had to make another man to replace him when he was gone, you would not have killed him:  you would have risked your own life to save his.  That is why all this empty talk of yours, which tempted Adam just now when he threw down his spade and listened to you for a while, went by me like foul wind that has passed over a dead body.  That is why there is enmity between Woman the creator and Man the destroyer.  I know you:  I am your mother.  You are idle:  you are selfish.  It is long and hard and painful to create life:  it is short and easy to steal the life others have made.  When you dug, you made the earth live and bring forth as I live and bring forth.  It was for that that Lilith set you free from the travail of women, not for theft and murder.

CAIN.  The Devil thank her for it!  I can make better use of my time than to play the husband to the clay beneath my feet.

ADAM.  Devil?  What new word is that?

CAIN.  Hearken to me, old fool.  I have never in my soul listened willingly when you have told me of the Voice that whispers to you.  There must be two Voices:  one that gulls and despises you, and another that trusts and respects me.  I call yours the Devil.  Mine I call the Voice of God.

ADAM.  Mine is the Voice of Life:  yours the Voice of Death.

CAIN.  Be it so.  For it whispers to me that death is not really death:  that it is the gate of another life:  a life infinitely splendid and intense:  a life of the soul alone:  a life without clods or spades, hunger or fatigue—­

EVE.  Selfish and idle, Cain.  I know.

CAIN.  Selfish, yes:  a life in which no man is his brother’s keeper, because his brother can keep himself.  But am I idle?  In rejecting your drudgery, have I not embraced evils and agonies of which you know nothing?  The arrow is lighter in the hand than the spade; but the energy that drives it through the breast of a fighter is as fire to water compared with the strength that drives the spade into the harmless dirty clay.  My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.

ADAM.  What is that word?  What is pure?

CAIN.  Turned from the clay.  Turned upward to the sun, to the clear clean heavens.

ADAM.  The heavens are empty, child.  The earth is fruitful.  The earth feeds us.  It gives us the strength by which we made you and all mankind.  Cut off from the clay which you despise, you would perish miserably.