We had another hope. We were going to express ourselves so simply and so truly that we would be expressing the people. ED [_Wearily._] The People. I looked at them all the way across this continent. Oh, I got so tired looking at them--on farms, in towns, in cities. They’re like toys that you wind up and they’ll run awhile. They don’t want to be expressed. It would topple them over. The longer I looked the more ridiculous it seemed to me that we should be giving our lives to--[_Picks up the magazine and reads._] _The People_--“A Journal of the Social Revolution.” Certainly we’d better cut the sub-title. The social revolution is dead. OSCAR You don’t think you are bringing back any news, do you, Ed? ARTIST [_Taking up magazine._] Instead of a sub-title we could have a design. Much better. [_Glares at OSCAR, then begins to draw._ SARA This is a long way from what you felt a year ago, Ed. You had vision then. ED You can’t keep vision in this office. It’s easy enough to have a beautiful feeling about the human race when none of it is around. The trouble about doing anything for your fellow-man is that you have to do it with a few of them. Oh, of course that isn’t fair. We care. I’ll say that for us. Even Oscar cares, or he wouldn’t work the way he has. But what does our caring come to? It doesn’t connect up with anything, and God knows it doesn’t seem to be making anything very beautiful of us. There’s something rather pathetic about us. OSCAR Or is it merely ridiculous? SARA Let me read you something, Ed. [_She takes The People and reads very simply._] “We are living now. We shall not be living long. No one can tell us we shall live again. This is our little while. This is our chance. And we take it like a child who comes from a dark room to which he must return--comes for one sunny afternoon to a lovely hillside, and finding a hole, crawls in there till after the sun is set. I want that child to know the sun is shining upon flowers in the grass. I want him to know it before he has to go back to the room that is dark. I wish I had pipes to call him to the hilltop of beautiful distances. I myself could see farther if he were seeing at all. Perhaps I can tell _you_: you who have dreamed and dreaming know, and knowing care. Move! Move from the things that hold you. If you move, others will move. Come! Now. Before the sun goes down.” [_Very quietly._] You wrote that, Ed. ED Yes, I wrote it; and do you want to know why I wrote it? I wrote it because I was sore at Oscar and wanted to write something to make him feel ashamed of himself. [_While SARA is reading, THE WOMAN has appeared at the door, has moved a few steps into the room as if drawn by the words she is hearing. Behind her are seen THE BOY from Georgia, THE MAN from the Cape._ THE WOMAN