iston is
always very strong on the unmarried mother in her speeches."

He had a sudden furious vision of how glibly these women at the Suffrage
meeting would have talked of Marion's case and how utterly incapable
they would have been to conceive its tragedy; how that abominable woman
in sky-blue would have spoken gloatingly of man's sensuality while she
herself was bloomed over with the sensual passivity that provokes men to
cruel and extravagant demands. That nobody but himself ever seemed to
have one inkling of the cruelty of her fate he took as evidence that
everybody was tacitly in league with the forces that had worked towards
it, and he found himself unable to exempt Ellen from this suspicion. If
she began to chatter about Marion, if she talked about her without that
solemnity which should visit the lips of those who talk of martyred
saints, there would begin a battle between his loves, the issue of which
was not known to him. He said with some exasperation: "I'm not talking
of _the_ unmarried mother; I am talking of my mother, who was not
married to my father...."

But she did not hear him. The news, though it had roused that high pitch
of trembling apprehension which it now knew at any mention of the sequel
of love, had not shocked her. In order to feel that quick reaction of
physical loathing to the story of an irregular relationship before
hearing its details, which is known as being shocked, one must be either
not quite innocent and have ugly associations with sex, or have had
reason to conceive woman's life as a market where there are few buyers,
and a woman who is willing to live with a lover outside marriage as a
merchant who undersells her competitors; and Ellen was innocent and
undefeated. It seemed to her, indeed, just such a story as she might
have expected to hear about his birth. It was natural that to find so
wonderful a child one would have to go to the end of the earth. There
appeared before her mind's eye a very bright and clean picture, perhaps
the frontispiece of some forgotten book read in her childhood, which
represented a peasant girl clambering on to a ledge half-way up a cliff
and holding back a thorny branch to look down on a baby that, clad in a
little shirt, lay crowing and kicking in a huge bird's nest. She
wondered what manner of woman it was that had so recklessly gone forth
and found this world's wonder. "What is your mother like? Tell me, what
is she like?"

"What is she like?"