"What of him?" she asked, growing very pale, and rising again from her seat.
"Only this one thing, Frances: that you can't serve God and mammon, you know; you can't keep both. You must choose between him and me."
"Choose!" She sat down again suddenly, as if her strength had failed her. "Choose! between Geoff, my little Geoff—my boy—my baby—Geoff——"
There was a kind of ridicule in her voice, a ridicule which was tragic, which was full of passion, which sounded like a scoff at something preposterous, as well as an indignant protest.
"Your scorn does not make it different. Yes, Geoff, who is all that: and me—between him and me."
For a moment they gazed at each other, having arrived at that decisive point, in a duel of the kind, when neither antagonist can find a word more to say. Lady Markland was very pale. She had been brought in a moment from her ease and quiet, when she expected no harm, to what might be the most momentous decision. She was still feeble, her nerves strained and weak from the long tension at which they had been held. She had clasped her hands together, and the fingers quivered. Her eyes seemed to grow larger and more luminous as she looked at him. "Theo," she said with a long breath. "Theo! do you know—what you are saying? Do you mean—all that—all that?"
He thought he was going to get an easy, an unlooked-for victory; he congratulated himself with a swift flash of premature triumph that he had pushed matters to a crisis, that he had been so firm. "Yes," he cried, "I mean it all! We can't go on longer as we are. You must choose between him and me."
She kept looking at him, still without relaxing from that fixed gaze. "Do you know what you are asking?" she said again. "That I should give up my child,—my first-born child, my little delicate boy, who has never been parted from me. Was it ever heard of that a mother was asked to give up her child?"
"They have done it," he said,—"you must know that,—when a higher claim came in."
"Is there any higher claim? Every other is at our own choice, but this is nature. God made it. It cannot change. There may be other—other"—she faltered, her voice grew choked,—"but only one mother," she said.