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What mother has ever refused to marry the father of her
own child? None.

MRS. ARBUTHNOT. Let me be the first, then. I will not do it.

GERALD. Mother, you believe in religion, and you brought me up to
believe in it also. Well, surely your religion, the religion that
you taught me when I was a boy, mother, must tell you that I am
right. You know it, you feel it.

MRS. ARBUTHNOT. I do not know it. I do not feel it, nor will I
ever stand before God's altar and ask God's blessing on so hideous
a mockery as a marriage between me and George Harford. I will not
say the words the Church bids us to say. I will not say them. I
dare not. How could I swear to love the man I loathe, to honour
him who wrought you dishonour, to obey him who, in his mastery,
made me to sin? No: marriage is a sacrament for those who love
each other. It is not for such as him, or such as me. Gerald, to
save you from the world's sneers and taunts I have lied to the
world. For twenty years I have lied to the world. I could not
tell the world the truth. Who can, ever? But not for my own sake
will I lie to God, and in God's presence. No, Gerald, no ceremony,
Church-hallowed or State-made, shall ever bind me to George
Harford. It may be that I am too bound to him already, who,
robbing me, yet left me richer, so that in the mire of my life I
found the pearl of price, or what I thought would be so.

GERALD. I don't understand you now.

MRS. ARBUTHNOT. Men don't understand what mothers are. I am no
different from other women except in the wrong done me and the
wrong I did, and my very heavy punishments and great disgrace. And
yet, to bear you I had to look on death. To nurture you I had to
wrestle with it. Death fought with me for you. All women have to
fight with death to keep their children. Death, being childless,
wants our children from us. Gerald, when you were naked I clothed
you, when you were hungry I gave you food. Night and day all that
long winter I tended you. No office is too mean, no care too lowly
for the thing we women love - and oh! how I loved YOU. Not Hannah,
Samuel more. And you needed love, for you were weakly, and only
love could have kept you alive. Only love can keep any one alive.
And boys are careless often and without thinking give pain, and we
always fancy that when they come to man's estate and know us better
they will repay us. But it is not so. The world draws them from
our side, and they make friends with whom they are happier than
they are with us, and have amusements from which we are barred, and
interests that are not ours: and they are unjust to us often, for
when they find life bitter they blame us for it, and when they find
it sweet we do not taste its sweetness with them . . . You made
many friends and went into their houses and were glad with them,
and I, knowing my secret, did not dare to follow, but stayed at

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