RUTH (rising). Well, mother.
MARY (kissing her). You're warm in here.
RUTH. We need to be.
MARY. It's bitter cold to-night.
(Ruth pulls chair from table and sits, putting Mary in her own chair. Mary looks scornfully at the book placed on table.) Reading, were you? Well, one way of idling's as bad as another and reading never did anybody good that ever I heard of. That's what your father's always doing with his spare time now. Tom Paine's Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. Stuffing his old head with all manner of new-fangled politics.
RUTH. But this isn't politics, mother. It's poetry. (Mary sniffs.) The Corsair. Lord Byron's poem.
MARY. I've heard of him and nothing good neither.
RUTH. Nothing good! Why, mother, he——
MARY. A lot of things, I dare say. Well, I've gone for fifty years without the power of reading and I reckon I'll go through without it to the end. I've no time to be idle.
RUTH. I've no time to be anything else.