"I would. He's my cure. A good home with a good man and money enough to travel and forget myself. Alma, Mama knows she's not an angel—sometimes when she thinks what she's put her little girl through this last year, she just wants to go out on the hill-top where she caught the neuralgia and lay down beside that grave out there and—"
"Mama, don't talk like that!"
"But now's my chance, Alma, to get well. I've too much worry in this big hotel trying to keep up big expenses on little money and—"
"I know it, mama. That's why I'm so in favor of finding ourselves a sweet, tiny little apartment with kitch—"
"No! Your father died with the world thinking him a rich man and it will never find out from me that he wasn't. I won't be the one to humiliate his memory—a man who enjoyed keeping up appearances the way he did. Oh, Alma, Alma, I'm going to get well now. I promise. So help me God, if I ever give in to—to it again."
"Mama, please. For God's sake, you've said the same thing so often only to break your promise."
"I've been weak, Alma; I don't deny it. But nobody who hasn't been tortured as I have, can realize what it means to get relief just by—"
"Mama, you're not playing fair this minute. That's the frightening part. It isn't only the neuralgia any more. It's just desire. That's what's so terrible to me, mama. The way you have been taking it these last months. Just from—desire."
Mrs. Samstag buried her face, shuddering down into her hands.
"Oh, God, my own child against me!"