GIBSON: Nora, the law of the United States doesn't recognize any classes—and I don't know why you and I should. We both like Montaigne and Debussy. You've even condescended to laugh with me at times about something funny in the shop. Of course not lately; but you used to. In everything worth anything aren't we really in the same class?
NORA: We are not. We never shall be—and we never were! Even before we were born we weren't! You came into this life with a silver spoon. I was born in a tenement room where five other people lived. My father was a man with a great brain. He never got out of the tenements in his life; he was crushed and kept under; yet he was a well-read man and a magnificent talker; he could talk Marx and Tolstoi supremely. Yet he never even had time to learn English.
GIBSON: I wish you could have heard what my father talked for English!
Half the time I couldn't understand him myself. He was Scotch.
NORA: Your father wasn't crushed under the capitalistic system as mine was. My father was an intellectual.
GIBSON: Mine was a worker. They both landed at Castle Garden, didn't they?
NORA: What of that? Mine remained a thinker and a revolutionist; yours became a capitalist.
GIBSON: No; he got a job—in a piano factory.
NORA: Yes, and took advantage of the capitalistic system to own the factory.
GIBSON: Before he did own it he worked fourteen hours a day for twelve years. That's why he owned it.
NORA: How many hours a day do you work, Mr. Gibson?