"Your aunt does. That's how she sees it, being an honest woman."
"I must try to show you you're wrong—in time. For the moment I'm only concerned to do everything in my power to make your future secure and calm your mind."
"Are you? Then marry me. That's the only way you can make my future secure, and you well know it."
"I can't marry you. I shall never marry. I am very firmly convinced that to marry a woman is to do her a great injury nine times out of ten."
"Worse than seducing her and leaving her alone in the world with a bastard child, I suppose?"
"You're not alone in the world, and your child is my child, and I recognise the fullest obligations to you both."
"Liar! If you'd recognised your obligations, you wouldn't have let it come into the world nameless and fatherless."
She rose.
"You want everything your own way, and you think you can bend everything to your own way. But you'll not bend me no more. You've broke me, and you've broke your child. We're rubbish—rubbish on the world's rubbish heap—flung there by you. I, that was so proud of myself! We'll go to the grave shamed and outcast—failures for people to laugh at or preach over. Your child's doomed now. The State and the Church both turn their backs on such as him. You can't make him your lawful son now."
"I can do for him all any father can do for a son."