ELIZABETH: And I do love Aunt Adelaide, but I think its going to be awfully amusing to be around with mother now—and help her with her work. Help do some useful beautiful thing.
CLAIRE: I am not doing any useful beautiful thing.
ELIZABETH: Oh, but you are, mother. Of course you are. Miss Lane says so. She says it is your splendid heritage gives you this impulse to do a beautiful thing for the race. She says you are doing in your way what the great teachers and preachers behind you did in theirs.
CLAIRE: (who is good for little more) Well, all I can say is, Miss Lane is stung.
ELIZABETH: Mother! What a thing to say of Miss Lane. (from this slipping into more of a little girl manner) Oh, she gave me a spiel one day about living up to the men I come from.
(CLAIRE turns and regards her daughter.)
CLAIRE: You'll do it, Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH: Well, I don't know. Quite a job, I'll say. Of course, I'd have to do it in my way. I'm not going to teach or preach or be a stuffy person. But now that—(she here becomes the product of a superior school) values have shifted and such sensitive new things have been liberated in the world—
CLAIRE: (low) Don't use those words.
ELIZABETH: Why—why not?