But there had come on Marion the tribulation that falls on unhappy people when they see before them a gleam of happiness.  She had to lay hold of it.  Although she knew that she was irritating the girl, she said:  “But, Ellen, really you ought to marry Richard soon!” She forced herself to speak glibly and without reserve, though it seemed to her that in doing so she was somehow participating in the glittering vulgarity of the place where they sat.  “I want Richard’s happiness to be assured.  I want to see him certainly, finally happy.  I may die soon.  I’m fifty, and my heart is bad.  I want him to be so happy that when I die he won’t grieve too much.  For, you see, he is far too fond of me—­quite unreasonably fond.  And even if I live for quite a long time I still will be miserable if he doesn’t find happiness with someone else.  You see, I’ve had various troubles in my life.  Some day I will tell you what they are.  I can’t now.  I don’t mean in the least that I’m trying to shut you out from our lives.  But if I started talking about them my throat would close.  I suppose I’ve been quiet about it for so many years that I’ve lost the way of speaking out everything but small talk.  But the point is that Richard frets about these troubles far too much.  He lives them all over again every time he sees they are worrying me.  I want you to give him a fresh, unspoiled life to look after, which will give him pleasure to share as my life has given him pain.  Do this for him.  Please do it.  Forgive me if I’m being a nuisance to you.  But, you see, I feel so responsible for Richard.”  She looked across the restaurant, as if on the great wall at its other end there hung a vast mirror in which there was reflected the reality behind all these appearances.  She seemed, with her contracted brows and compressed lips, to be watching its image of her destiny and checking it with her reason’s estimate of the case.  “Yes!” she sighed, and shivered and stiffened her back as if there had fallen on her something magnificent and onerous.  “I am twice as responsible for Richard as most mothers are for their sons.”

She would have left it cryptically at that if she had not seen that Ellen would have disliked her as a mystificator.  She drew her hand across her brow, and immediately perceived that the gesture had so evidently expressed dislike of this obligation to confide that the girl was again alienated, and in desperation she cried out all she meant.  “I’m responsible for him in the usual way.  By loving his father.  Much more than the usual way, most people would tell me, because of course I knew it wasn’t lawful.  But there’s something more than that.  I was so very ill before he was born that the doctor wanted to operate and take him away from me long before there was any chance of his living.  I knew he would be illegitimate and that there would be much trouble for us both, but I wanted him so much that I couldn’t bear them to kill him.  So I risked it, and struggled through till he was born.  So you see it’s twice instead of once that I have willed him into the world.  I must see to it that now he is here he is happy.”