ANTONIN [after a moment’s hesitation, firmly] No.
JULIE. Why not?
ANTONIN. How absurd you are. Because I don’t choose, of course.
JULIE. But we’ve often talked of having children. You’ve made plans with me about what we should do with them.
ANTONIN [laughing] I know. You liked it, and it was something to talk about. But for the future we’re to be perfectly straight with one another.
JULIE. Do you mean that we are never to have any children?
ANTONIN [nods] We can’t afford them, my dear, at present. And if we wait till we’re forty [shrugs], people would laugh.
JULIE. Don’t you know what it was that made me willing to marry? Don’t you know that it was this thought of having children, this and this alone, that decided me? And you refuse me this. To be a wife, to be a mother, is the natural end of life for me. And something will be wanting and my life will be incomplete, and I shall not have lived if my arms have never clasped a baby born of my flesh; if I have never suckled it, cried over it, felt all the cares and all the joys that mothers feel. And you would rob me of this. Merely because you love money, because you are self-seeking and ambitious. Great Heavens, to think that you should have such power over my life! People talk of tyranny; they make revolts against Governments; there are women who clamor for a vote; who demand that the marriage law should be the same for women as for men; and they don’t understand that it is marriage itself they should attack, that they should attack with fury, since it allows such an infamy.
ANTONIN. For goodness sake don’t begin again. Remember, we made it up.