‘Oh no, you don’t belong to me,’ said Mrs. Fairfield in fierce sarcasm. ‘I’m only your mother: that’s all.’
‘Precisely,’ said Edward. ‘Our mother, not our owner. We belong to nobody. We have our separate lives to live, and we intend to live them in our own way.’
‘You’re mine, mine, mine!’ protested his mother. ‘Don’t you feel any common gratitude for what I’ve done for you? I gave you life; I fed you with my body; and now—is this the end?’
‘Those are services that cannot be repaid,’ he answered, without any trace of emotion. ‘If in return for what you did for me I had to submit to be your doll for ever, it were better that I had not been born at all.’
‘Brutal, brutal!’ interjected his father, waking from a spell of bewilderment.
‘Perhaps,’ conceded Edward, ‘but it’s nature. Nature is brutal. Do you think that because you gave me life, as you say, that you have the right to take it away, or smother it, or confine it, at your pleasure? You shut your eyes to logical inference. See to what absurd conclusions your wild unreasoning would lead you if you dared follow it to the end. Time and again civilization has been hindered in its march....’
For a moment Sheila ceased her loyal silent applause to ask herself: Why does Edward talk like a parliamentary candidate? But Mrs. Fairfield quickly distracted her attention from that question.
‘I see,’ she said, ‘I’m nothing to you. I’m only your mother. This bit of a girl, who’s done nothing for you, whom you’ve known ten minutes, is more to you than your mother is.’
Edward assented gravely. ‘So much more than I propose to live with her and not with you. You were a bit of a girl yourself once, mother. If father had been more devoted to his mother than to you, you might have been a childless spinster at this moment.’
‘Now then,’ said Mr. Fairfield, briskly asserting himself. ‘We’ve had about enough of this. Mother’s had her say. And you’ve had yours. You’ve got the gift of the gab all right. Now just you cut along and leave your mother alone.’