Summary

Scene Ten is titled “John Wisehammer and Mary Brenham Exchange Words.” Mary copies out the words of the play as Wisehammer stacks bricks. Wisehammer comments on some of the words that she is writing, particularly focusing on “country” and how it can mean so many things, at one point saying that some “die for their country” while others are “thrown out” of their country (49). He describes how much he loves words, and how he memorized a dictionary that his father had found and brought home. Mary asks him what “indulgent” means, and he tells her it means “ready to overlook faults” (50). This leads him into musing about how adding the word “in” at the beginning of a word can change its meaning completely, citing the word “injustice” as an example (50), and also referring to how painful something as beautiful as “innocence...