proprietress a little—­real kind-’earted woman she was.  She said to me ’See here.  You stop with me and help me in the bureau and have your baby.  I’ll look after you.  And when you can get about again, stop on and help me in my business.  I reckon you’re the type of woman I’ve bin looking out for this long while.’  And that’s how the first of the Warren Hotels was started and that’s where you were born ... in October, Eighteen—­seventy—­five—­”

(Vivie gave a little shudder, but her mother’s thoughts were so intent on the past that she did not perceive it.)

Mrs. Warren:  “Dj’ever see yer Aunt Liz?”

Vivie told her of the grim experiences already touched on in Chapter
I.

Mrs. Warren:  “Well she dropped me—­completely—­from the time she married that Canon.  And I respected her.  She was comfortably off, her past was dead and done with.  D’yer think I wanted to bother ’er?  Not I. It depends so much on the way you was born and brought up.  If Liz had been the child of a respectable married couple that could give her a good start in life, ’probability is she’d have run straight from the first.  Dunno about me.  I was always a bit larky.  And yet d’you know, I think if yer father hadn’t been a sort of young god, with his head in the skies, and no reg’lar income, if he’d a married me and been kind to me ...  I should have been an honest woman all the rest of me life....

“What do you feel about morality?  You don’t seem to have much faith in religion, yet you’ve always taken a high line—­and somehow I’m glad you have—­about things that never seemed to me to matter much.  We’re given these passions and desires—­and my! don’t it hurt, falling in love!—­and then the clergy, though they’re awful humbugs, tells us we must deny our cravings...”

Vivie:  “In the main the clergy are right in what they preach though they give the wrong reasons.  We must try to regulate our passions or they will master us, stifle what is really good in us.  My solution of this problem which I am so sick of discussing....  But let’s finish with it while we are about it—­my solution is that the State and the Community should do their utmost to encourage, subsidize, reward early marriages; and at the same time facilitate in a reasonable degree divorce.  Apply both these remedies and you would go far to wipe out prostitution, which I think perfectly horrible—­I—­I should like to penalize it.  Perhaps it is the Irish ascetic in my constitution.  A good many early marriages might be failures.  Well then, at the end of ten years these should be dissolvable, with proper provision made for the children.  I think many a couple if they knew that after a time and without scandal their partnership could be dissolved wouldn’t, when the time came, want it.  While on the other hand if you made the tie not everlastingly binding, young people—­especially if they hadn’t to trouble about means—­would get married without hesitation or delay.  I should not only encourage that, but I should give every woman a heavy bonus for bringing a living child into the world....  Now let’s talk of something else.  When are you going to take me to Louvain?”