“Nay, none of that,” she bade him harshly. “If I were soft enough to let it hurt me, that’s my look out. But here’s the point, Sam. There’s another woman soft about you, too, and she’s not the same as me. I’d had you since I bore you, and I were not young when you and me came to a parting; but she’s young, and you’ll none make Eflie suffer the road I suffered while there’s strength in me to say you nay. I’d have gone to my grave without your knowing this if it hadn’t been for Effie. It’s not good for a man to know too much. They’re easy stuffed with pride.”
She pretended, with deep magnanimity, to think that he had not known until she told him, but they both knew very well that he had always known. She dwelt deliberately on it now to inform him, not of her suffering, but of the intensity of her feeling for Effie. It was so intense that she could speak of her own suffering: for Effie’s sake she had unveiled, thrown off her stoicism, and flung the spoken truth as a challenge and a revelation at him.
He knew what speaking in this manner cost her, but he was stubborn still in relating all she said to her ungovernable hate of Ada; whereas Anne did not hate Ada ungovernably, but only when Ada hurt Sam.
Again he said “Mother!” and got no further with it.
“I know I’m your mother,” she said, “and you can stop thinking of me now and think of Effie.”
“I’m trying to,” he said.
“Well?” said Anne impatiently. She hadn’t imagined an obstinacy which would not yield to what she had said. Surely he knew the sacrifice of pride she made in saying it! And there was Effie, too, who said little and looked the more.
“I don’t know,” he despaired.
“Then others must know for you,” said Anne, and when his lips only tightened at that, “Sam,” she pleaded, “surely you’ll never go against the pair of us.”
But there were two Effies, and he wasn’t “going against” them both, while he held Anne to be mesmerized by hate of Ada. For all that, it desolated him to be in opposition to them now, to Anne and Effie, the women who counted, the women who gave. “Still,” he had to say, “there’s Ada.”