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Scene: The parlor of the Jordan Homestead at Venzie, Maine.

''It is late October, and through the two windows at the back one may see a bleak countryside, the grass brown and lifeless, and the bare limbs of the trees silhouetted against a gray sky. Here, in the room that for a hundred years has been the rallying point of the Jordan family, a group of relatives are gathered to await the death of the old woman who is the head of their clan. The room in which they wait is as dull and as drab as the lives of those who have lived within its walls. Here we have the cleanliness that is next to godliness, but no sign of either comfort or beauty, both of which are looked upon with suspicion as being signposts on the road to perdition''.

''In this group are the following characters: Henry Jordan, a heavy set man of fifty, worn by his business cares into a dull sort of hopeless resignation. Emma, his wife, a stout and rather formidable woman of forty, with a look of chronic displeasure; Nettie, her daughter by a former marriage, a vain and shallow little rustic beauty; Sadie, a thin, tight-lipped woman of forty, a widow and a gossip; Orin, her son, a pasty-faced boy''