I don’t think I’m more prejudiced or straitlaced than you:  I think I’m less.  I’m certain I’m less sentimental.  I know very well that fashionable morality is all a pretence, and that if I took your money and devoted the rest of my life to spending it fashionably, I might be as worthless and vicious as the silliest woman could possibly be without having a word said to me about it.  But I don’t want to be worthless.  I shouldn’t enjoy trotting about the park to advertize my dressmaker and carriage builder, or being bored at the opera to shew off a shopwindowful of diamonds.

MRS WARREN [bewildered] But—­

VIVIE.  Wait a moment:  I’ve not done.  Tell me why you continue your business now that you are independent of it.  Your sister, you told me, has left all that behind her.  Why don’t you do the same?

MRS WARREN.  Oh, it’s all very easy for Liz:  she likes good society, and has the air of being a lady.  Imagine me in a cathedral town!  Why, the very rooks in the trees would find me out even if I could stand the dulness of it.  I must have work and excitement, or I should go melancholy mad.  And what else is there for me to do?  The life suits me:  I’m fit for it and not for anything else.  If I didn’t do it somebody else would; so I don’t do any real harm by it.  And then it brings in money; and I like making money.  No:  it’s no use:  I can’t give it up—­not for anybody.  But what need you know about it?  I’ll never mention it.  I’ll keep Crofts away.  I’ll not trouble you much:  you see I have to be constantly running about from one place to another.  Youll be quit of me altogether when I die.

VIVIE.  No:  I am my mother’s daughter.  I am like you:  I must have work, and must make more money than I spend.  But my work is not your work, and my way is not your way.  We must part.  It will not make much difference to us:  instead of meeting one another for perhaps a few months in twenty years, we shall never meet:  thats all.

MRS WARREN [her voice stifled in tears] Vivie:  I meant to have been more with you:  I did indeed.

VIVIE.  It’s no use, mother:  I am not to be changed by a few cheap tears and entreaties any more than you are, I daresay.

MRS WARREN [wildly] Oh, you call a mother’s tears cheap.

VIVIE.  They cost you nothing; and you ask me to give you the peace and quietness of my whole life in exchange for them.  What use would my company be to you if you could get it?  What have we two in common that could make either of us happy together?

MRS WARREN [lapsing recklessly into her dialect] We’re mother and daughter.  I want my daughter.  I’ve a right to you.  Who is to care for me when I’m old?  Plenty of girls have taken to me like daughters and cried at leaving me; but I let them all go because I had you to look forward to.  I kept myself lonely for you.  You’ve no right to turn on me now and refuse to do your duty as a daughter.