Mrs. Warren’s Profession

your work, and my way is not your way. We must part. It will not make much difference to us: instead of meeting one another for perhaps a few months in twenty years, we shall never meet: that’s all. Mrs. Warren Her voice stifled in tears. Vivie: I meant to have been more with you: I did indeed. Vivie It’s no use, mother: I am not to be changed by a few cheap tears and entreaties any more than you are, I daresay. Mrs. Warren Wildly. Oh, you call a mother’s tears cheap. Vivie They cost you nothing; and you ask me to give you the peace and quietness of my whole life in exchange for them. What use would my company be to you if you could get it? What have we two in common that could make either of us happy together? Mrs. Warren Lapsing recklessly into her dialect. We’re mother and daughter. I want my daughter. I’ve a right to you. Who is to care for me when I’m old? Plenty of girls have taken to me like daughters and cried at leaving me; but I let them all go because I had you to look forward to. I kept myself lonely for you. You’ve no right to turn on me now and refuse to do your duty as a daughter. Vivie Jarred and antagonized by the echo of the slums in her mother’s voice. My duty as a daughter! I thought we should come to that presently. Now once for all, mother, you want a daughter and Frank wants a wife. I don’t want a mother; and I don’t want a husband. I have spared neither Frank nor myself in sending him about his business. Do you think I will spare you? Mrs. Warren Violently. Oh, I know the sort you are⁠—no mercy for yourself or anyone else. I know. My experience has done that for me anyhow: I can tell the pious, canting, hard, selfish woman when I meet her. Well, keep yourself to yourself: I don’t want you. But listen to this. Do you know what I would do with you if you were a baby again⁠—aye, as sure as there’s a Heaven above us? Vivie Strangle me, perhaps. Mrs. Warren No: I’d bring you up to be a real daughter to me, and not what you are now, with your pride and your prejudices and the college education you stole from me⁠—yes, stole: deny it if you can: what was it but stealing? I’d bring you up in my own house, so I would. Vivie Quietly. In one of your own houses. Mrs. Warren Screaming. Listen to her! listen to how she spits on her mother’s grey hairs! Oh! may you live to have your own daughter tear and trample on you as you have trampled on me. And you will: you will. No woman ever had luck with a mother’s curse on her. Vivie I wish you wouldn’t rant, mother. It only hardens me. Come: I suppose I am the only young woman you ever had in your power that you did good to. Don’t spoil it all now. Mrs. Warren Yes. Heaven forgive me, it’s true; and you are the only one that ever turned on me. Oh, the injustice of it, the injustice, the injustice! I always wanted to be a good woman. I tried honest work; and I was slave-driven until I cursed the day I ever heard of honest work. I was a good mother; and because I made my daughter a good woman she turns me out as if I were a leper. Oh, if I only had my life to live over again! I’d talk to that lying clergyman in the school. From this time forth, so help me Heaven in my last hour, I’ll do wrong and nothing but wrong. And I’ll prosper on it. Vivie Yes: it’s better to choose your line and go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am bidding you goodbye now. I am right, am I not? Mrs. Warren Taken aback. Right to throw away all my money! Vivie No: right to get rid of you? I should be a fool not to? Isn’t that so? Mrs. Warren Sulkily. Oh, well, yes, if you come to that, I suppose you are. But Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing! And now I’d better go than stay where I’m not wanted. She turns to the door. Vivie Kindly. Won’t you shake hands? Mrs. Warren After looking at her fiercely for a moment with a savage impulse to strike her. No, thank you. Goodbye. Vivie Matter-of-factly. Goodbye. Mrs. Warren goes out, slamming the door behind her. The strain on Vivie’s face relaxes; her grave expression breaks up into one of joyous content; her breath goes out in a half sob, half laugh of intense relief. She goes buoyantly to her place at the writing table; pushes the electric lamp out of the way; pulls over a great sheaf of papers; and is in the act of dipping her pen in the ink when she finds Frank’s note. She opens it unconcernedly and reads it quickly, giving a little laugh at some quaint turn of expression in it. And goodbye, Frank. She tears the note up and tosses the pieces into the wastepaper basket without a second thought. Then she goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in her figures.

Endnotes

1. Many a specialist of the stalls will shudder at his own dreary conception of such an audience; but I can assure him that he would hardly know where he was on such an occasion, so much more vital would the atmosphere be, and so much jollier and better looking