Page:Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama - 1914.djvu/244

 with the latter's wife and child induces old Rutherford to forgive his son's marriage with a shop-girl, but because he needs John to serve the house of Rutherford. The one inexorable purpose, always and ever!

His second son Richard, who is in the ministry, and "of no use" to old Rutherford' s God of stone, receives the loving assurance: "You were no good for my purpose, and there's the end; for the matter o' that, you might just as well never ha' been born."

For that matter, his daughter Janet might also never have been born, except that she was "good enough" to look after her father's house, serve him, even helping take off his boots, and submitting without a murmur to the loveless, dismal life in the Rutherford home. Her father has sternly kept every suitor away, "because no one in Grantley's good enough for us." Janet has become faded, sour and miserable with yearning for love, for sunshine and warmth, and when she at last dares to partake of it secretly with her father's trusted man Martin, old Rutherford sets his iron heel upon her love, and drags it through the mud till it lies dead.

Again, when he faces the spirit of rebellion in his son John, Rutherford crushes it without the slightest hesitation in behalf of his one obsession, his one God-the House of Rutherford.

John