en be amusing. That's really you, isn't it, Dick?

DICK: Not quite all of her--I should say.

CLAIRE: (_gaily_) Careful, Dick. Aren't you indiscreet? Harry will be
suspecting that I am your latest strumpet.

HARRY: Claire! What language you use! A person knowing you only by
certain moments could never be made to believe you are a refined woman.

CLAIRE: True, isn't it, Dick?

HARRY: It would be a good deal of a lark to let them listen in at
times--then tell them that here is the flower of New England!

CLAIRE: Well, if this is the flower of New England, then the half has
never been told.

DICK: About New England?

CLAIRE: I thought I meant that. Perhaps I meant--about me.

HARRY: (_going on with his own entertainment_) Explain that this is what
came of the men who made the laws that made New England, that here is
the flower of those gentlemen of culture who--

DICK: Moulded the American mind!

CLAIRE: Oh! (_it is pain_)

HARRY: Now what's the matter?

CLAIRE: I want to get away from them!

HARRY: Rest easy, little one--you do.

CLAIRE: I'm not so sure--that I do. But it can be done! We need not be
held in forms moulded for us. There is outness--and otherness.

HARRY: Now, Claire--I didn't mean to start anything serious.

CLAIRE: No; you never mean to do that. I want to break it up! I tell
you, I want to break it up! If it were all in pieces, we'd be (_a little
laugh_) shocked to aliveness (_to_ DICK)--wouldn't we? There would be
strange new comings together--mad new comings together, and we would
know what it is to be born, and then we might know--that we are. Smash
it. (_her hand is near an egg_) As you'd smash an egg. (_she pushes the
egg over the edge of the table and leans over and looks, as over a
precipice_)

HARRY: (_with a sigh_) Well, all you've smashed is the egg, and all that
amounts to is that now Tom gets no egg. So that's that.

CLAIRE: (_with difficulty, drawing herself back from the fascination of
the precipice_) You think I can't smash anything? You think life can't
break up, and go outside what it was? Because you've gone dead in the
form in which you found yourself, you think that's all there is to the
whole adventure? And that is called sanity. And made a virtue--to lock
one in. You never worked with things that grow! Things that take a
sporting chance--go mad--that sanity mayn't lock them in--from life
untouched--from life--that waits, (_she turns toward the inner room_)
Brea