"Sit down, Leslie, and listen to me. You will not despise me; you know how I love her!"
She stopped, as if she could not go on, and then it seemed as if her tongue was loosed.
She spoke rapidly, choking back more than one dry sob.
"Sunnie is the only bit of joy that God has left me. He has tempered that. I see her suffer, I know how much she misses. I see other healthy, happy children, and remember what she was when she was born."
"I never forget, never for one moment, day or night, what she might be and what she is. She is reconciled to it, but she is not natural, not child-like—she—don't be shocked, God is weaning her from me to Himself. I do not love Him; how can I? She does. Her interest is in the Unseen—mine is not; she loves me as she does her nurse, not as she does God!"
"And, Leslie, listen to me: she is my child—I must have her; she is all that is left to me. I want her to rise from her sofa, to shake off all her unnatural goodness and devotion, to leave it with her cushions and couch, and to come out into the world with me, her mother! Listen! I have stood aside all these years seeing you, and even strangers, gather, round her couch and amuse and interest her hour by hour. I have sat downstairs in my lonely drawing-room and heard the music and the laughter overhead. My heart is too full of passion and bitterness to join in it."
"The child knows I have no sympathy in her pretty fancies and conceits. Life is too real, too horrible to me to pretend to look at it with her innocent eyes. So I have looked on, as I say, and seen her turn to you instead of to me for her amusement and entertainment. Don't mistake me, I have never grudged you one hour you have spent with her. I am grateful, deeply grateful to you for doing what I could never do. I don't know if I am grateful to you and to her nurse, for making her so religious, but I am grateful to you for making her little life a bright and happy one."
"But now—oh, how can I tell you? Ever since you told me there might be a chance of her recovery, that she might, if this operation and treatment is successful, be able to stand and walk, and even be like other girls, how I have hugged the hope of it to my heart, how I have resolved to have my way and will with her, should she regain her health! I am desperately anxious, Leslie, about to-morrow's result! I feel I am staking my all on it, but if we win, my child shall be mine, ten thousand times more than she has ever been! I shall come first with her. I will take her out, and let her mix with other children, and clear her mind of all these morbidly religious fancies."
"Don't think I want to make a clean sweep of you, but I am tired of being in the background; I am tired of feeling my child is more saintly than I am! I want her to drop to her mother's level, to turn to me for wisdom and counsel, to think of earth and all it can give her, and be a little companion to me. A cripple child may well be a saint, but a healthy one, never!"
This passionate revelation of a soul that had shut itself away from others for so long startled its hearer.