JANET

(passionately)

Never! Never! That I’m sure of. Whatever happens, even if Johnny should come to hate me for what I did, I shall always be glad to have been his mother. At least I shall have lived. These poor women who go through life listless and dull, who have never felt the joys and the pains a mother feels, how they would envy me if they knew! If they knew! To know that a child is your very own, is a part of you. That you have faced sickness and pain and death itself for it. That it is yours and nothing can take it from you because no one can understand its wants as you do. To feel it’s soft breath on your cheek, to soothe it when it is fretful and still it when it cries, that is motherhood and that is glorious!

[Johnny runs in by the door on the left. He is obviously in the highest spirits at the thought of going home.