I wish I could bring him back for a mome...

I wish I could bring him back for a moment, so you could see what he was before he shook so. He was a powerful man, who was as real as the earth. He was strangely of the earth, as if something went from it to him. Queer you should be the one to have no sentiment about him, for you and he—sometimes when I'm with you it's as if—he were near. He had no personal ambition, Madeline. He was ambitious for the earth and its people. I wonder if you can realize what it meant to my father—in a strange land, where he might so easily have been misunderstood, pushed down, to find a friend like that? It wasn't so much the material things—though Uncle Silas was always making them right—and as if—oh, hardly conscious what he was doing—so little it mattered. It was the way he got father, and by that very valuing kept alive what was there to value. Why, he literally laid this country at my father's feet—as if that was what this country was for, as if it made up for the hard early things—for the wrong things.

Susan Glaspell, Inheritors, Full Text