nd impose on Dr. Pindar's simplicity, proves it.
MINNIE. You know all about me, Mrs. Pindar.
AUGUSTA. I wasn't born yesterday.
MINNIE. Oh, ladies like you, Christian ladies, are hard! They won't
believe nothing good of anybody--only the bad. You've always been
sheltered, you've always had everything you'd want, and you come and
judge us working girls. You'd drive me out of the only real happiness
I ever had, being here with a man like Dr. Jonathan, doing work it's
a pleasure to do--a pleasure every minute!--work that may do good to
thousands of people, to the soldiers over there--maybe to George, for
all you know! (She burst into tears.) You can't understand--how could
you? After all, you're his mother. I oughtn't to forget it.
AUGUSTA. Yes, I'm his mother. And you? You haven't given up the idea
that he may marry you some day, if you stay here and pretend to have
reformed. You write to him. George may have been foolish, but he isn't
as foolish as that!
MINNIE. He doesn't care about me.
AUGUSTA. I'm glad you realize it. But you mean to stay here in Foxon
Falls, nevertheless. You take advantage of Dr. Pindar, who is easily
imposed upon, as his father was before him. But if I told you that you
might harm Dr. Pindar by staying here, interfere with his career, would
you be willing to leave?
MINNIE. Me? Me doing Dr. Jonathan harm?
AUGUSTA, Yes. I happen to know that he has very little money. He makes
none, he never asks anyone for a bill. He spends what he has on this
kind of thing--research, for the benefit of humanity, as he thinks,--but
very little research work succeeds, and even then it doesn't pay.
MINNIE. He doesn't care about money.
AUGUSTA. Perhaps not. He is one of those impractical persons who have to
be looked out for, if they are fortunate enough to have anyone to look
out for them. Since he is a cousin of my husband, Mr. Pindar considers
him as one of his many responsibilities. Mr. Pindar has always had, in
a practical way, the welfare of his working people at heart, and now he
proposes to establish a free hospital for them and to put Dr. Pindar
in charge of it. This will give him a good living as well as a definite
standing in the community, which he needs also.
MINNIE. He's the biggest man in Foxon Falls today!
AUGUSTA. That is as one thinks. At any rate, he has this opportunity.
Are you going to stand in the way of it?
MINNIE. Me stand in the way of it?
AUGUSTA. If Dr. Pindar ac
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