By the standards of our own time, if not of that, it was a minor event.

No disgrace or cause for distress.

Why should it have taken so long to acknowledge error? 

No one can really know what their lives were like. This play is not history.

 

 

 

We never touched, Abby.

Aye, but we did.

Aye, but we did not.

No one was naked. You mistake yourself.

 

They want slaves, not such as I.

Pity me, pity me.

Give me a word… a soft word. 

 

I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake 

and walk about the house 

as though I’d find you coming through some door,

And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes?

I will not, I cannot!

You burned my ignorance away.

 

A wild thing may say wild things. 

We never conjured spirits,

But I have no joy in it.

 

Oh Lorraine, the world’s so full of hypocrites!

Oh, how hard it is when pretence falls!

If I live, if I am not murdered, until the last hypocrite is dead–––

 

 

 

 

Reverend Parris is praying now.