"Yes, and I might have struck a much harder bargain with you than that. You would have consented. I might have taken the child and paid you off. That's often done, you know, in cases like yours."
She was sobbing now. "You're cruel," she said. "Yes, you are cruel, even when you're pretending to be nice. You like hurting me. Pay me off! Anybody'd think, to hear you talk, I'd been a loose woman."
"I've never said that, or implied it."
"No, you've never said it. You wouldn't dare. But you've made me feel that's how you look at me. Why didn't you pay me off, then, and get rid of me?"
"Exactly. Why didn't I?"
"Well? I'm asking you."
"I was willing to give you your chance. Whatever I may have thought of you, I didn't want to deprive you of your child, or him of his mother, so long as you were ready to make yourself the kind of mother he ought to have had. You said you'd do it. You were grateful to me. You consented to every stipulation I laid down. The chief of them all was that you should break absolutely with your past until he came of age. Then you could do what you liked; it would be between you and him. Now you want to break that stipulation. I say that if you break it on one side you break it on the other; I also say that it would be a very wicked thing to break it, now at this time."
"It wouldn't be if you'd just let me go away for a bit and come back."
"That I won't do. Why do you want to go away? It isn't just to see your mother. I know that well enough. You want the life of London, the life you led there before Harry was born—theatres, and suppers and gaiety, with the sort of people that you ought to be ashamed of mixing yourself up with, when you think about Harry, and what he is. You've done without it for nearly eighteen years. For goodness' sake do without it for a little time longer. Don't knock down what we've been building up for all these years, just for a selfish whim. Think of Harry, not of yourself."
"I do think of him. I love him better than anything in the world. I'd go barefoot if it was to do something for him."