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: 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.
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