There hasn’t been a Jordan, before Ben, who’s disgraced the name in more’n a hundred years; he stands indicted before the Grand Jury for some of his drunken devilment. If he hadn’t run away, like the criminal he is, he’d be in the State’s Prison now, down to Thomaston. Don’t talk _Ben_ to me, after the way he broke mother’s heart, and hurt my credit! NETTIE I don’t remember him very well. Mother thought it better I shouldn’t come around last time he was here; but he looked real nice in his uniform. SADIE It was his bein’ born so long after us that made him seem like an outsider; father and mother hadn’t had any children for years and years! Of course I never want to sit in judgment on my own parents, but I never approved of it; it never seemed quite--what I call proper. NETTIE (_to Emma_) Mother, don’t you think I’d better leave the room? SADIE (_angrily_) Not if half the stories I’ve heard about you are true, I don’t. HENRY Come, come, no rows! Is this a time or place for spite? We’ve always been a united family, we’ve always got to be,--leavin’ Ben out, of course. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. ORIN Mum! Say Mum! (_He pulls at Sadie’s dress_) Why should anybody want to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear? ELLA Can’t you stop that boy askin’ such fool questions? SADIE Well, as far as that goes, why should they? It never sounded reasonable to me. HENRY (_sternly_) Decent folks don’t reason about religion; they just accept it. ORIN You could make a skin purse out of a sow’s ear, but I’ll be darned if you could make a silk purse out of one. I’ll bet God couldn’t. HENRY Are you going to let him talk about God like that, like he was a real person? ELLA I don’t know as a body could expect any better; his father was a Baptist! SADIE (_angrily_) His father was a good man, and if he talked about God different from what you do, it was because he knew more about him. And as for my being here at all--(_she rises with her arms about Orin_)--I wouldn’t do it, not for anything less than my own mother’s deathbed. HENRY This family don’t ever agree on nothin’ but just to differ. EMMA As far as I see, the only time you ever get together is when one of you is dead. ELLA Maybe that’s the reason I got such a feelin’ against funerals. [_The outside door opens and Jane enters, a druggist’s bottle in her hand; she is followed by John Bradford, a man of about thirty-five. He is better dressed than any of the others and is a man of a more cosmopolitan type,--a New Englander, but a university man, the local judge and the leading lawyer of the town._ JANE I met Judge Bradford on the way. JUDGE (_John Bradford_) Court set late. I couldn’t get here before. Jane tells me that she’s very low. HENRY Yes. JUDGE I can’t realize it; she has always been so strong, so dominant. ELLA In the midst of life we are in death.