Una. Dear Mother, I was sorry to hear that you don't feel well. No sooner had Father left the studio than I hurried to see how you were. As much as I love my art, I do not wish to be away from home, Mother dear, when you are not well.

Mother. Dear Girl, with us old people there is always something wrong; one moment we feel well, the next moment we don't. What worries me is to see you going only in one direction. The art to which you are so devoted is to us a foreign word. For you know, however poor we may be in our family, there is no such thing known among us as an artist.

Una. Dear Mother, it is not that I love art in order to become an artist. I don't want to become anything; it is beauty that I love.

Mother. My simple child, beauty is to be seen in nature; you need not go to art in order to see beauty. Besides, as they say: 'The country is made by God, the town is made by man.'

Una. Dear Mother, I have always felt that what is not completed in nature is finished in art by the Master of all things. The hand of the artist is guided by the eyes unseen.

Mother. But what do you gain by devoting all your time to something in which you don't wish to make your career? You must think of the future, my dear girl!

Una. Mother dear, we all make our future with whatever we do. But it is the future that will tell what we made. Life to me is the making of something; it only depends what we make. We each make something; it is we who make our highest ideal.

Mother. What do you mean by ideal, my dear child? There is no such thing, my darling girl. Ideal is not to be found in this world. You are yet too young, my darling, to know this. When we were young, we thought also of ideals, but alas, in the end we found that it was only a word.

Una. You are right, Mother, there is never an ideal to be found under the sun, if we do not make it. It is we who, out of our own selves, give all that the ideal wants for it to become an ideal. What we make remains; what we are is destroyed.

Rumi says, in his Mathnawi (I, 30),
Beloved is all in all, the lover only veils Him;
Beloved is all that lives, the lover a dead thing.
Rumi, Mathnawi I, 30

One creates a heart out of a rock; another turns a heart into a rock.

Mother. Say simple things, my dear girl. This is all confusing to me; what your mother wants is your welfare, your happiness. This is all we wish for you, I and your father both.

(Enter Father.)

Father. Are you here, Una? Get ready to go to the ball. Have you forgotten you were invited to go to Mrs. Wilkins' house?

Una. I had quite forgotten, Father. Thank you for reminding me. I'll just go and get ready. (She embraces her mother and departs.)

Curtain