"I don't even know what I'm feeling. I don't even know if I do at all."
Jean is reluctant to join in her family's raucous but premature celebration of her brother Mick's safe return. She feels as though something is wrong, but she isn't exactly sure what. Phoebe has just verbally abused old Billy Rice for helping himself to a slice of cake, not knowing that the cake was set aside for Mick's return celebration. At some level, she and Archie both know that Mick isn't coming home. Yet she is unwilling to say so.
Jean, like Archie, doesn't know if she "feels" anything. She is out of touch with her emotions, having suppressed them for years in order to survive the dysfunctional chaos that is Rice family life. She has recently ended an engagement with Graham Dodd, who regards her as inherently different from her family of origin but who appears to Jean to not truly appreciate them. Jean feels intuitively that there is more of a world out there to experience. Yet she is indeed emotionally isolated from the family: after Mick's funeral, when Phoebe and Frank simply want to let their grief run its course, it is Jean who insists on picking a fight with her father over his ill-advised affair with a young woman.
"You can't afford not to like him. You owe him too much."
Phoebe likes Archie's more successful brother Bill, but is disappointed that he can't bring his wife or children to visit. During one visit, his vehicle is vandalized by the local street children. She feels somewhat patronized, yet she is grateful for his support. She regards him with a little bit of hero-worship similar to her feelings about members of the British aristocracy she reads about in the newspapers.
Archie hates and resents Bill because he owes him so much. Bill paid for Jean's educational expenses along with discreet gifts of money to Phoebe to help run the household when Archie's income was insufficient. Archie is fully aware that he depends on money from Bill, his father Billy, and even his son Frank in order to run the household.
"You'd better start thinking about Number One, Jeannie, because nobody else is going to do it for you."
Frank is telling his older half-sister that her idealism is about to get her into serious trouble. She needs to pay attention to who she is and what she wants out of life, and then start taking steps to get it before she becomes a "nobody". Success isn't going to be handed out to anyone, and there are economic and social forces at work that tend to keep people down no matter how hard they work. Frank, for example, is a sensitive young man with a fine mind and good artistic vision, yet the only work he can find involves shoveling coal all day.
Up to this point, Jean has been coasting through life, fitfully experimenting and trying to figure out where she fits in. She has just ended her engagement with Graham, and is hanging about her father's family despite having nothing to contribute to it except her somewhat annoying presence. Frank, whose work helps to maintain the household, is still socially subordinate to his father in many ways, but he has an insight the others lack. Frank recognizes that if Jean remains too long in the Rice family environment, she will forever lose the option of exiting it. Indeed, by the end of the play, she rejects Graham a second time and decides that she prefers the dysfunction. Her decision to move to Canada and stay with Phoebe (something that not even Uncle Bill predicted) is indeed an act of free will, but it is opposite to the one that could have led to a free and independent life.
"I wish to God I could, I wish to God I could feel like that old black bitch with her fat cheeks, and sing. If I'd done one thing as good as that in my whole life, I'd have been all right. Better than all your getting on with the job without making a fuss, or doing something constructive and all that, all your rallies in Trafalgar Square! I wish to God I were that old hag. I'd stand up and shake my great bosom up and down, and lift my head and make the most beautiful fuss in the world."
Archie is describing a musical performance he once witnessed in which the performer was so emotionally in touch with her audience, her performance, and the music that he was overwhelmed with the desire to feel what she felt, so as to perform the same way. Ironically, he gets his wish: when Mick is killed, he finally feels a blow so emotionally devastating that he, too, lifts his head and makes the most beautiful fuss in the world. The thing he wants to feel-- the thing that eventually gets through to him-- turns out to be pain.
"You never miss a thing, do you? Observation-- is the basis of all Art."
This is one of the delicious throw-away lines in the play, the sort that reminds the audience that Archie has depths that his shallow jocularity cover up. He is in fact an extremely well educated man who is fully capable of thinking through, analyzing, and philosophizing about his situation. Like his father Billy, he is a professional showman and he takes "Art" seriously not only as a profession but as an ideal. But the mention of "Art", intended to change the subject and throw Jean off track, is unsuccessful: Jean has noticed that Archie is hiding something, and wants to know what it is. It turns out that Mick has been taken prisoner.
