He must be queer, like his father, your great uncle, Henry Pindar.

GEORGE. Tell me about Dr. Jonathan. A scientist,--isn't he? Suddenly
decided to come back to live in the old homestead.

ASHER. On account of his health. He was delicate as a boy. He must
have been about eight or nine years old when Uncle Henry left Foxon Falls
for the west,--that was before you were born. Uncle Henry died somewhere
in Iowa. He and my father never got along. Uncle Henry had as much as
your grandfather to begin with, and let it slip through his fingers. He
managed to send Jonathan to a medical school, and it seems that he's had
some sort of a position at Johns Hopkins's--research work. I don't know
what he's got to live on.

GEORGE. Uncle Henry must have been a philanthropist.

ASHER. It's all very well to be a philanthropist when you make more than
you give away. Otherwise you're a sentimentalist.

GEORGE. Or a Christian.

ASHER. We can't take Christianity too literally.

GEORGE (smiling). That's its great advantage, as a religion.

ASHER. George, I don't like to say anything just as you're going to
fight for your country, my boy, but your attitude of religious skepticism
has troubled me, as well as your habit of intimacy with the shop hands.
I confess to you that I've been a little afraid at times that you'd take
after Jonathan's father. He never went to church, he forgot that he owed