Fejevary monologue (Act 6) — Plays

(_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.