“That’s where you’ve been such a help to me.  You had no justification for supposing that life was worth living.  You’d every reason to suppose that the whole business was foul, and the only sensible thing to do was to get all the fun one could out of it.  If you had determined to be as little a mother to me as you could I would have understood it, considering of what I must have reminded you.  You’d money, you were beautiful, you’ve always been able to attract people.  You might so easily have gone away from here and made a life of your own and just kept me in the corner of your eye, as lots of unhappily married women that one meets keep their children.  Instead you shut yourself up here and gave yourself utterly to looking after me.  I sometimes feel that the reason I’ve grown up taller and less liable to illness than other men is that you loved me so much when I was a child.  You seemed to pour your life into me.  And you didn’t just take pleasure in me.  You trained me, and I must have been a nasty little brute to train.  Do you remember licking me because I went to that circus?  You took it out of yourself teaching me to be straight and decent.  If you’d been an ordinary married woman who believed that you’d go to hell if you didn’t do your duty by your children, and who knew she’d get public respect and the devotion of her husband as a reward for doing it, the way you did it would have been magnificent.  But to do it like that when you knew that there was no such thing as justice in heaven or earth—­I tell you, mother, it’s kept me going to think of the sacrifice you made for me—­”

“Oh no,” she cried.  “It wasn’t a sacrifice at all, my dear, to be with you.”

“It must have been,” he said harshly, as if he were piling up a case against a malefactor, “for you of all women.”  He drew her alongside of him and stared up at her.  “Weren’t there bad times, when you hated being cheated of your youth?  When you longed for a husband—­for some man to adore you and look after you?  When you felt bitter because it had all been over so soon?” She averted her face, but his arm gripped her waist more closely, and he asked pleadingly, “Mother, let me know everything about you.  I’ll be married soon.  There’ll be no more talking like this while the moon goes down after that.  Let me know everything you’ve done for me, everything you’ve given me.  Why shouldn’t I know how wonderful you are?  Tell me, weren’t there bad times?”

Slowly and reluctantly she turned towards him a face that, wavering with grief, looked strangely childish between her two greying plaits.  “I never went to a dance,” she said unsteadily.  “Isn’t it silly of me I mind that?...  Till a few years ago I couldn’t bear to hear dance music....”