MRS WARREN.  My own opinions and my own way of life!  Listen to her talking!  Do you think I was brought up like you? able to pick and choose my own way of life?  Do you think I did what I did because I liked it, or thought it right, or wouldn’t rather have gone to college and been a lady if I’d had the chance?

VIVIE.  Everybody has some choice, mother.  The poorest girl alive may not be able to choose between being Queen of England or Principal of Newnham; but she can choose between ragpicking and flowerselling, according to her taste.  People are always blaming circumstances for what they are.  I don’t believe in circumstances.  The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

MRS WARREN.  Oh, it’s easy to talk, isn’t it?  Here! would you like to know what my circumstances were?

VIVIE.  Yes:  you had better tell me.  Won’t you sit down?

MRS WARREN.  Oh, I’ll sit down:  don’t you be afraid. [She plants her chair farther forward with brazen energy, and sits down.  Vivie is impressed in spite of herself].  D’you know what your gran’mother was?

VIVIE.  No.

MRS WARREN.  No, you don’t.  I do.  She called herself a widow and had a fried-fish shop down by the Mint, and kept herself and four daughters out of it.  Two of us were sisters:  that was me and Liz; and we were both good-looking and well made.  I suppose our father was a well-fed man:  mother pretended he was a gentleman; but I don’t know.  The other two were only half sisters:  undersized, ugly, starved looking, hard working, honest poor creatures:  Liz and I would have half-murdered them if mother hadn’t half-murdered us to keep our hands off them.  They were the respectable ones.  Well, what did they get by their respectability?  I’ll tell you.  One of them worked in a whitelead factory twelve hours a day for nine shillings a week until she died of lead poisoning.  She only expected to get her hands a little paralyzed; but she died.  The other was always held up to us as a model because she married a Government laborer in the Deptford victualling yard, and kept his room and the three children neat and tidy on eighteen shillings a week—­until he took to drink.  That was worth being respectable for, wasn’t it?

VIVIE [now thoughtfully attentive] Did you and your sister think so?

MRS WARREN.  Liz didn’t, I can tell you:  she had more spirit.  We both went to a church school—­that was part of the ladylike airs we gave ourselves to be superior to the children that knew nothing and went nowhere—­and we stayed there until Liz went out one night and never came back.  I know the schoolmistress thought I’d soon follow her example; for the clergyman was always warning me that Lizzie’d end by jumping off Waterloo Bridge.  Poor fool:  that was all he knew about it!  But I was more afraid of the whitelead factory