"Isn't it exactly what you say to me? Why should you suppose your society is any more gratification to me than mine is to you?"
"I wish to goodness you would say good-bye to me, then, for a time. Why isn't it possible? It is possible. I tell you I'm going, and I'm coming back."
"Do you remember anything at all about the bargain we struck when you first came here, or have you forgotten it entirely, after nearly eighteen years, as you say?"
"Of course I remember it. You didn't mince your words then any more than you do now. You made me feel that I was dirt beneath your feet, but you'd put up with me for the sake of preventing my boy—if it was to be a boy—doing what his father had done, and marrying somebody he loved, if you didn't think she was good enough for him."
"You can put it like that if it pleases you. You consented to everything. You yourself wanted the child brought up with nothing to remind him that on one side his birth wasn't suited to his long ancestry on the other. I warned you what the sacrifice would be. It meant giving up your own people, for one thing, and you gladly consented to do that. It meant your doing your utmost to fill the position that I freely offered you here."
"So I have done my utmost."
"And now, when what we agreed to do together has turned out better than either of us could have hoped for, when we are very nearly at the end of it, and can send Harry out into the world what we have made of him here, you want to break the bargain. And why? Not for any good it can possibly do him, but just because you want to go back to what you were before you came here—for your own petty selfish pleasure."
"It isn't that," she said vehemently. "I say it isn't natural that anybody should cut themselves off from their own flesh and blood. I loved my father and he died without me setting eyes on him. You let me write to mother then. I didn't do it without asking you, and——"
"Didn't we strike the bargain afresh then? Didn't I say I was sorry that it should have been required of you to cut yourself off from your family, but that it had already then proved to be the right course? And didn't you agree with me, though it was harder for you to bear then than at any time?"
The tears came. "Of course it was hard, then," she said. "But you were kind to me. So you were when I first came. If I was giving up something, I was going to get something too. All that I'd been was to be forgotten, though it isn't true that I'd been anything that I ought not to have been. Harry was to grow up knowing me as belonging here. You were to be his legal guardian, but he was to be my child."