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a dollar and never will! You’ve never saved a dollar in your life! At the end of each season you’re penniless! You’ve thrown your salary away every week on whores and whiskey!
JAMIE
    My salary! Christ!
TYRONE
    It’s more than you’re worth, and you couldn’t get that if it wasn’t for me. If you weren’t my son, there isn’t a manager in the business who would give you a part, your reputation stinks so. As it is, I have to humble my pride and beg for you, saying you’ve turned over a new leaf, although I know it’s a lie!
JAMIE
    I never wanted to be an actor. You forced me on the stage.
TYRONE
    That’s a lie! You made no effort to find anything else to do. You left it to me to get you a job and I have no influence except in the theater. Forced you! You never wanted to do anything except loaf in barrooms! You’d have been content to sit back like a lazy lunk and sponge on me for the rest of your life! After all the money I’d wasted on your education, and all you did was get fired in disgrace from every college you went to!
JAMIE
    Oh, for God’s sake, don’t drag up that ancient history!
TYRONE
    It’s not ancient history that you have to come home every summer to live on me.
JAMIE
    I earn my board and lodging working on the grounds. It saves you hiring a man.
TYRONE
    Bah! You have to be driven to do even that much!
    His anger ebbs into a weary complaint.
    I wouldn’t give a damn if you ever displayed the slightest sign of gratitude. The only thanks is to have you sneer at me for a dirty miser, sneer at my profession, sneer at every damned thing in the world—except yourself.
JAMIE
    Wryly.
    That’s not true, Papa. You can’t hear me talking to myself, that’s all.
TYRONE
    Stares at him puzzledly, then quotes mechanically.
    “Ingratitude, the vilest weed that grows”!
JAMIE
    I could see that line coming! God, how many thousand times—!
    He stops, bored with their quarrel, and shrugs his shoulders.
    All right, Papa. I’m a bum. Anything you like, so long as it stops the argument.
TYRONE
    With indignant appeal now.
    If you’d get ambition in your head instead of folly! You’re young yet. You could still make your mark. You had the talent to become a fine actor! You have it still. You’re my son—!
JAMIE
    Boredly.
    Let’s forget me. I’m not interested in the subject. Neither are you.
    Tyrone gives up. Jamie goes on casually.
    What started us on this? Oh, Doc Hardy. When is he going to call you up about Edmund?
TYRONE
    Around lunch time.
    He pauses—then defensively.
    I couldn’t have sent Edmund to a better doctor. Hardy’s treated him whenever he was sick up here, since he was knee high. He knows his constitution as no other doctor could. It’s not a question of my being miserly, as you’d like to make out.
    Bitterly.
    And what could the finest specialist in America do for Edmund, after he’s deliberately ruined his health by the mad life he’s led ever since he was fired from college? Even before that when he was in prep school, he began dissipating and playing the Broadway sport to imitate you, when he’s never had your constitution to stand it. You’re a healthy hulk like me—or you were at his age—but he’s always been a bundle of nerves like his mother. I’ve warned him for years his body couldn’t stand it, but he wouldn’t heed me, and now it’s too late.
JAMIE
    Sharply.
    What do you mean, too late? You talk as if you thought—
TYRONE
    Guiltily explosive.
    Don’t be a damned fool! I meant nothing but what’s plain to anyone! His health has broken down and he may be an invalid for a long time.
JAMIE
    Stares at his father, ignoring his explanation.
    I know it’s an Irish peasant idea consumption is fatal. It probably is when you live in a hovel on a bog, but over here, with modern treatment—
TYRONE
    Don’t I know that! What are you gabbing about, anyway? And keep your dirty tongue off Ireland, with your sneers about peasants and bogs and hovels!
    Accusingly.
    The less