Maybe I’ll go back there some time. I don’t know as I’d mind farming a place over there. Most of their farms are awful little, but I don’t know but what I’d like it. JANE Farming is farming. Why not try it here? BEN Look out there! (_He points out of the window at the drifted snow_) It’s like that half the year, froze up, everything, most of all the people. Just a family by itself, maybe. Just a few folks, good an’ bad, month after month, with nothin’ to think about but just the mean little things, that really don’t amount to nothin’, but get to be bigger than all the world outside. JANE (_sewing_) Somebody must do the farming, Ben. BEN Somebody like the Jordans, that’s been doin’ it generation after generation. Well, look at us. I heard a feller, in a Y.M.C.A. hut, tellin’ how nature brought animals into the world, able to face what they had to face---- JANE Yes, Ben? BEN That’s what nature’s done for us Jordans,--brought us into the world half froze before we was born. Brought us into the world mean, and hard, so’s we could live the hard, mean life we have to live. JANE I don’t know, Ben, but what you could live it different. BEN They _laugh_ over there, and sing, and God knows when I was there they didn’t have much to sing about. I was at a rest camp, near Nancy, after I got wounded. I told you about the French lady with all those children that I got billeted with. JANE Yes. BEN They used to _sing_, right at the table, and laugh! God! It brought a lump into my throat mor’n once, lookin’ at them, and rememberin’ the Jordans! JANE I guess there wasn’t much laughing at your family table. BEN Summers nobody had much time for it, and winters,--well, I guess you know. JANE Yes. BEN Just a few folks together, day after day, and every little thing you don’t like about the other raspin’ on your nerves ’til it almost drives you crazy! Most folks quiet, because they’ve said all the things they’ve got to say a hundred times; other folks talkin’, talkin’, talkin’ about nothing. Sometimes somebody sort of laughs, and it scares you; seems like laughter needs the sun, same as flowers do. Icebound, that’s what we are all of us, inside and out. [_He stands looking grimly out window._ JANE Not all. I laughed a lot before I came here to live. BEN (_turns and looks at her_) I remember, you were just a little girl. JANE I was fourteen. See if there’s a spool of black sewing cotton in that drawer. BEN (_looking in drawer_) You mean thread? JANE Yes. BEN This it? [_He holds up a spool of white thread._ JANE Would you call that black? BEN (_looks it over_) No--it ain’t black. (_He searches and finds black thread_) Maybe this is it! JANE Maybe it is! (_She takes it_) You were with that French family quite a while, weren’t you? BEN