e corner of your eye, as lots of unhappily married women
that one meets keep their children. Instead you shut yourself up here
and gave yourself utterly to looking after me. I sometimes feel that the
reason I've grown up taller and less liable to illness than other men is
that you loved me so much when I was a child. You seemed to pour your
life into me. And you didn't just take pleasure in me. You trained me,
and I must have been a nasty little brute to train. Do you remember
licking me because I went to that circus? You took it out of yourself
teaching me to be straight and decent. If you'd been an ordinary married
woman who believed that you'd go to hell if you didn't do your duty by
your children, and who knew she'd get public respect and the devotion of
her husband as a reward for doing it, the way you did it would have been
magnificent. But to do it like that when you knew that there was no such
thing as justice in heaven or earth--I tell you, mother, it's kept me
going to think of the sacrifice you made for me--"

"Oh no," she cried. "It wasn't a sacrifice at all, my dear, to be with
you."

"It must have been," he said harshly, as if he were piling up a case
against a malefactor, "for you of all women." He drew her alongside of
him and stared up at her. "Weren't there bad times, when you hated being
cheated of your youth? When you longed for a husband--for some man to
adore you and look after you? When you felt bitter because it had all
been over so soon?" She averted her face, but his arm gripped her waist
more closely, and he asked pleadingly, "Mother, let me know everything
about you. I'll be married soon. There'll be no more talking like this
while the moon goes down after that. Let me know everything you've done
for me, everything you've given me. Why shouldn't I know how wonderful
you are? Tell me, weren't there bad times?"

Slowly and reluctantly she turned towards him a face that, wavering with
grief, looked strangely childish between her two greying plaits. "I
never went to a dance," she said unsteadily. "Isn't it silly of me I
mind that?... Till a few years ago I couldn't bear to hear dance
music...."

"Oh, you poor darling!--and you would have danced so beautifully!" he
cried in agony, and drew her into his arms. She tried to beat herself
free and twisted her mouth away from his consoling kisses, so that she
might sob, "But it wasn't a sacrifice, it wasn't a sacrifice! Those were
only moods. I neve