VIVIE [jarred and antagonized by the echo of the slums in her mother’s voice] My duty as a daughter!  I thought we should come to that presently.  Now once for all, mother, you want a daughter and Frank wants a wife.  I don’t want a mother; and I don’t want a husband.  I have spared neither Frank nor myself in sending him about his business.  Do you think I will spare you?

MRS WARREN [violently] Oh, I know the sort you are:  no mercy for yourself or anyone else. I know.  My experience has done that for me anyhow:  I can tell the pious, canting, hard, selfish woman when I meet her.  Well, keep yourself to yourself:  I don’t want you.  But listen to this.  Do you know what I would do with you if you were a baby again? aye, as sure as there’s a Heaven above us.

VIVIE.  Strangle me, perhaps.

MRS WARREN.  No:  I’d bring you up to be a real daughter to me, and not what you are now, with your pride and your prejudices and the college education you stole from me:  yes, stole:  deny it if you can:  what was it but stealing?  I’d bring you up in my own house, I would.

VIVIE [quietly] In one of your own houses.

MRS WARREN [screaming] Listen to her! listen to how she spits on her mother’s grey hairs!  Oh, may you live to have your own daughter tear and trample on you as you have trampled on me.  And you will:  you will.  No woman ever had luck with a mother’s curse on her.

VIVIE.  I wish you wouldn’t rant, mother.  It only hardens me.  Come:  I suppose I am the only young woman you ever had in your power that you did good to.  Don’t spoil it all now.

MRS WARREN.  Yes, Heaven forgive me, it’s true; and you are the only one that ever turned on me.  Oh, the injustice of it! the injustice! the injustice!  I always wanted to be a good woman.  I tried honest work; and I was slave-driven until I cursed the day I ever heard of honest work.  I was a good mother; and because I made my daughter a good woman she turns me out as if I were a leper.  Oh, if I only had my life to live over again!  I’d talk to that lying clergyman in the school.  From this time forth, so help me Heaven in my last hour, I’ll do wrong and nothing but wrong.  And I’ll prosper on it.

VIVIE.  Yes:  it’s better to choose your line and go through with it.  If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed in another.  You are a conventional woman at heart.  That is why I am bidding you goodbye now.  I am right, am I not?

MRS WARREN [taken aback] Right to throw away all my money!

VIVIE.  No:  right to get rid of you?  I should be a fool not to.  Isn’t that so?

MRS WARREN [sulkily] Oh well, yes, if you come to that, I suppose you are.  But Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing!  And now I’d better go than stay where I’m not wanted. [She turns to the door].

VIVIE [kindly] Won’t you shake hands?