CLARA.
Then may God not frown too severely on me if I come before he calls me! If I had myself alone to consider I would endure it patiently. If the world kicked me in my misery, instead of standing by me, I would bear it submissively and regard it as just punishment for I know not what! I would love my child, even if it had your features, and I would cry so much before the poor innocent thing that, when it grew older and wiser, it would certainly not despise and curse its mother. But it is not myself alone; and on Judgement Day I shall much more easily find an answer to the Judge's question: why did you drive your father to it?
LEANARD.
You talk as if you were the first woman and the last to find herself in your predicament! Thousands have gone through it before you and submitted to their fate. Thousands after you will be confronted with the same situation and accept their fate. Are all these others strumpets, that you are so anxious to stand in the corner by yourself? They also had fathers who invented a score of new oaths when they first heard of it, and talked about murder and homicide! Afterward they were ashamed of themselves and repented their oaths and blasphemies; they sat down and rocked the child, or fanned the flies away!
CLARA.
I readily believe that you fail to understand why anybody in the world should keep an oath.
SCENE III
Enter a boy
BOY.
Here are some flowers! I am not to say from whom they come!