"When you were born, I’d hardly so much as a blanket to wrap you in. I never had a bow of ribbon or a thing to dress you up pretty, like the other little babies. And when your father took sick, there wasn’t even a fresh sheet for him. ‘Take him off to the hospital,’ says the doctor. ‘He can’t be looked after in a place like this. He’ll die.’ ‘Very good, I die!’ says he. ‘But I die home!’ Poor man! There he lay, so hot and wretched, and you in a clothes-basket beside him fretting all day and all night, so he couldn’t get any rest and peace. We’d only the one room.
"Well, when he was taken sick, of course there was no money at all coming in. His precious ‘comrades’ never came near him, least of all the ones that owed him money; so I began going out by the day, and I left an old I-talian woman to take care of you and him. Every morning, when I’d go out, I’d feel sure and certain neither of you’d be alive and safe when I got back. Both of you sick, and no good food or proper care! And I’d think of her setting the place on fire, or leaving the gas turned on. Then I’d come home, tired as a dog, and not a soul to speak to: you a tiny little baby crying in your basket, and your poor father moaning in his bed; everything dirty and upset. You can’t think what it was like.
"I’m not blaming your poor father, Angelica. I’m only telling you this to show you how those high-flown notions—where they’ll lead you. In this world, you’ve got to be sensible, and not follow your own notions."
Not follow romance was what she meant, and what Angelica understood; for wasn’t that what she had done? And had won it, to see it perish in a long agony, as romance must always perish, whether won or lost. She wanted so passionately to make it all clear to her child, to tell her how she had seen the hard, the dull, the greedy, attain their heart’s desire; but the romantic, the generous, never. She wanted to tell her how hideous is the death of illusion, how merciless is the world. How her splendid hero, black-eyed Angelo with the flashing smile, had fallen from splendour—had, so to speak, dwindled into a miserable invalid, duped by his friends, and deprived of all courage by the knowledge of their treachery. How she had seen her youth go by unnoticed, unappreciated, in that struggle for bread; of the loneliness and the frightful indignities of poverty.
"It was a mistake," she said. "The whole thing was a big mistake!"
"I don’t know," said Angelica. "Maybe you wouldn’t have been any happier with a different man."
"I’d certainly have been happier with enough to eat. If I’d listened to my parents, I’d taken a sober, hard-working——”
"Bah!" cried Angelica, with the sudden fierceness that always startled her mother. "You married the man you wanted, didn’t you? He didn’t make any money, so you were poor. Well, what of it? You’ve—anyway you’ve got a memory of him, to look back at, haven’t you?"
And her mother hadn’t the heart to tell her the truth—that even in memory the ardent, enchanting lover was supplanted by the querulous and unshaven sufferer who lay dying for months and months of some disease which they didn’t understand, and which the busy doctor didn’t trouble to explain to them.