then walks in and closes the door. He
goes to his desk and touches the rose._]

GIBSON: Why didn't you take it this morning? That poor little rosebed in
my yard at home; it's just begun to brighten up. I suppose it thought it
was going to send you a June rose every day, as it did last June. You
don't want it?

NORA [_gently, but not abating her attitude_]: No, thank you!

GIBSON: [_dropping the rose upon his blotting pad, not into the glass
again_]: This is the fourth that's had to wither disappointed.

NORA [_in a low voice_]: Then hadn't you better let the others live?

GIBSON: I'd like to live a little myself, Nora. Life doesn't seem much
worth living for me as it is, and if your theories are making you detest
me I think I'm about through.

NORA: It's what you stand for that my theories make me detest--since you
used the word.

GIBSON: Well, what is it that I stand for?

NORA: Class and class hatred.

GIBSON: Which class is the hatred coming from?

NORA: From both!

GIBSON: Just in this room right now it seems to be all on one side. And
lately it has seemed to me to be more and more not so much class as
personal; because really, Nora, I haven't yet been able to understand
how a girl with your mind can believe that you and I belong to different
classes.

NORA: You don't! So long as capital exists you and I are in warring
classes, Mr. Gibson.

GIBSON: What are they?

NORA: Capitalist and proletariat. You can't get out of your class and I
don't want to get out of mine.

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