ve for quite a long time I
still will be miserable if he doesn't find happiness with someone else.
You see, I've had various troubles in my life. Some day I will tell you
what they are. I can't now. I don't mean in the least that I'm trying to
shut you out from our lives. But if I started talking about them my
throat would close. I suppose I've been quiet about it for so many years
that I've lost the way of speaking out everything but small talk. But
the point is that Richard frets about these troubles far too much. He
lives them all over again every time he sees they are worrying me. I
want you to give him a fresh, unspoiled life to look after, which will
give him pleasure to share as my life has given him pain. Do this for
him. Please do it. Forgive me if I'm being a nuisance to you. But, you
see, I feel so responsible for Richard." She looked across the
restaurant, as if on the great wall at its other end there hung a vast
mirror in which there was reflected the reality behind all these
appearances. She seemed, with her contracted brows and compressed lips,
to be watching its image of her destiny and checking it with her
reason's estimate of the case. "Yes!" she sighed, and shivered and
stiffened her back as if there had fallen on her something magnificent
and onerous. "I am twice as responsible for Richard as most mothers are
for their sons."

She would have left it cryptically at that if she had not seen that
Ellen would have disliked her as a mystificator. She drew her hand
across her brow, and immediately perceived that the gesture had so
evidently expressed dislike of this obligation to confide that the girl
was again alienated, and in desperation she cried out all she meant.
"I'm responsible for him in the usual way. By loving his father. Much
more than the usual way, most people would tell me, because of course I
knew it wasn't lawful. But there's something more than that. I was so
very ill before he was born that the doctor wanted to operate and take
him away from me long before there was any chance of his living. I knew
he would be illegitimate and that there would be much trouble for us
both, but I wanted him so much that I couldn't bear them to kill him. So
I risked it, and struggled through till he was born. So you see it's
twice instead of once that I have willed him into the world. I must see
to it that now he is here he is happy."

Ellen said in a little voice, "That was very brave of you," and soared