I've led!'

'Why> mother!' said Alice, shaking her ragged skirts to detach the old
woman from them: 'there are two sides to that. There have been years
for me as well as you, and there has been wretchedness for me as well as
you. Get up, get up!'

Her mother rose, and cried, and wrung her hands, and stood at a little
distance gazing on her. Then she took the candle again, and going round
her, surveyed her from head to foot, making a low moaning all the time.
Then she put the candle down, resumed her chair, and beating her hands
together to a kind of weary tune, and rolling herself from side to side,
continued moaning and wailing to herself.

Alice got up, took off her wet cloak, and laid it aside. That done, she
sat down as before, and with her arms folded, and her eyes gazing at the
fire, remained silently listening with a contemptuous face to her old
mother's inarticulate complainings.

'Did you expect to see me return as youthful as I went away, mother?'
she said at length, turning her eyes upon the old woman. 'Did you think
a foreign life, like mine, was good for good looks? One would believe
so, to hear you!'

'It ain't that!' cried the mother. 'She knows it!'

'What is it then?' returned the daughter. 'It had best be something that
don't last, mother, or my way out is easier than my way in.

'Hear that!' exclaimed the mother. 'After all these years she threatens
to desert me in the moment of her coming back again!'

'I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me
as well as you,' said Alice. 'Come back harder? Of course I have come
back harder. What else did you expect?'

'Harder to me! To her own dear mother!' cried the old woman

'I don't know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn't,'
she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and
compressed lips as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every
softer feeling from her breast. 'Listen, mother, to a word or two. If
we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps.
I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful
enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been
very dutiful to me?'

'I!' cried the old woman. 'To my gal! A mother dutiful to her own
child!'

'It sounds unnatural, don't it?' returned the daughter, looking coldly
on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; 'but I have
thought of it sometimes, in the cour