[He paces the floor again thoughtfully, then abruptly goes to
     the factory door; opens it and calls.]

GIBSON:  Miss Gorodna!

     [NORA appears in the doorway.  She looks at him with
     disapproving inquiry; then walks in and closes the door.  He
     goes to his desk and touches the rose.]

GIBSON:  Why didn’t you take it this morning?  That poor little rosebed in my yard at home; it’s just begun to brighten up.  I suppose it thought it was going to send you a June rose every day, as it did last June.  You don’t want it?

NORA [gently, but not abating her attitude]:  No, thank you!

GIBSON:  [dropping the rose upon his blotting pad, not into the glass again]:  This is the fourth that’s had to wither disappointed.

NORA [in a low voice]:  Then hadn’t you better let the others live?

GIBSON:  I’d like to live a little myself, Nora.  Life doesn’t seem much worth living for me as it is, and if your theories are making you detest me I think I’m about through.

NORA:  It’s what you stand for that my theories make me detest—­since you used the word.

GIBSON:  Well, what is it that I stand for?

NORA:  Class and class hatred.

GIBSON:  Which class is the hatred coming from?

NORA:  From both!

GIBSON:  Just in this room right now it seems to be all on one side.  And lately it has seemed to me to be more and more not so much class as personal; because really, Nora, I haven’t yet been able to understand how a girl with your mind can believe that you and I belong to different classes.

NORA:  You don’t!  So long as capital exists you and I are in warring classes, Mr. Gibson.

GIBSON:  What are they?

NORA:  Capitalist and proletariat.  You can’t get out of your class and I don’t want to get out of mine.

GIBSON:  Nora, the law of the United States doesn’t recognize any classes—­and I don’t know why you and I should.  We both like Montaigne and Debussy.  You’ve even condescended to laugh with me at times about something funny in the shop.  Of course not lately; but you used to.  In everything worth anything aren’t we really in the same class?

NORA:  We are not.  We never shall be—­and we never were!  Even before we were born we weren’t!  You came into this life with a silver spoon.  I was born in a tenement room where five other people lived.  My father was a man with a great brain.  He never got out of the tenements in his life; he was crushed and kept under; yet he was a well-read man and a magnificent talker; he could talk Marx and Tolstoi supremely.  Yet he never even had time to learn English.

GIBSON:  I wish you could have heard what my father talked for English!  Half the time I couldn’t understand him myself.  He was Scotch.

NORA:  Your father wasn’t crushed under the capitalistic system as mine was.  My father was an intellectual.