FEJEVARY: (_in a new manner--quietly, from feeling_) Madeline, have you no love for this place? MADELINE: (_doggedly, after thinking_) Yes, I have. (_she sits down_) And I don't know why I have. FEJEVARY: Certainly it's not strange. If ever a girl had a background, Morton College is Madeline Fejevary Morton's background. (_he too now seated by the table_) Do you remember your Grandfather Morton? MADELINE: Not very well. (_a quality which seems sullenness_) I couldn't bear to look at him. He shook so. FEJEVARY: (_turning away, real pain_) Oh--how cruel! MADELINE: (_surprised, gently_) Cruel? Me--cruel? FEJEVARY: Not just you. The way it passes--(_to himself_) so _fast_ it passes. MADELINE: I'm sorry. (_troubled_) You see, he was too old then-- FEJEVARY: (_his hand up to stop her_) I wish I could bring him back for a moment, so you could see what he was before he (_bitterly_) shook so. He was a powerful man, who was as real as the earth. He was strangely of the earth, as if something went from it to him. (_looking at her intently_) Queer you should be the one to have no sentiment about him, for you and he--sometimes when I'm with you it's as if--he were near. He had no personal ambition, Madeline. He was ambitious for the earth and its people. I wonder if you can realize what it meant to my father--in a strange land, where he might so easily have been misunderstood, pushed down, to find a friend like that? It wasn't so much the material things--though Uncle Silas was always making them right--and as if--oh, hardly conscious what he was doing--so little it mattered. It was the way he _got_ father, and by that very valuing kept alive what was there to value. Why, he literally laid this country at my father's feet--as if that was what this country was for, as if it made up for the hard early things--for the wrong things. MADELINE: He must really have been a pretty nice old party. No doubt I would have hit it off with him all right. I don't seem to hit it off with the--speeches about him. Somehow I want to say, 'Oh, give us a rest.' FEJEVARY: (_offended_) And that, I presume, is what you want to say to me. MADELINE: No, no, I didn't mean you, Uncle. Though (_hesitatingly_) I was wondering how you could think you were talking on your side. FEJEVARY: What do you mean--my side? MADELINE: Oh, I don't--exactly. That's nice about him being--of the earth. Sometimes when I'm out for a tramp--way off by myself--yes, I know. And I wonder if that doesn't explain his feeling about the Indians. Father told me how grandfather took it to heart about the Indians. FEJEVARY: He felt it as you'd feel it if it were your brother. So he must give his choicest land to the thing we might become. 'Then maybe I can lie under the same sod with the red boys and not be ashamed.' (MADELINE _nods, appreciatively_.) MADELINE: Yes, that's really--all right.