"And the letter?" It seemed all at once an immeasurable and irreparable loss. "I sent it back ... and, anyway, it turned out all right." I was possessed for the moment with the conviction that it was all dreadfully, despairingly wrong. "I couldn't have borne for you to marry anybody but a Christian, Olivia!" I thought of Tommy's exceedingly slender claim to that distinction and I laughed. "Tommy smokes," I said; "he says he has to do it with the customers." "Oh, but not as a habit, Olivia." I overrode that. "Tell me what became of him--of Mr. Garrett. Did you ever hear?" "He went West," she recollected; "I asked his aunt. He quarrelled with them because his uncle wouldn't send him to school. At his age they thought it wasn't suitable. I wouldn't have wanted you to go West, Olivia." I took her worn hands in mine. "It's all right, mother. I'm not going West. And I'm not going on the stage any more. I'm done with it." I felt so, passionately, at the time. We sat quietly for a time in that assurance and listened to Effie singing in the kitchen. "Olivia," she began timidly at last, "aren't you ever going to have any more children?" "Oh, I hope so, mother. I haven't been strong, you know, since the first one. We didn't think it advisable." "Well, if you can manage it that way ..." There was a trace in her tone of the woman who hadn't been able to manage. I wished to reassure her. "When I was in the hospital the doctor told me ..." I could see the deep flush rising over her face and neck; there were some things which her generation had never faced. I let them fall with her hands and sat gazing at the red core of the base burner, waiting until she should take up her thought again. "I used to think those things weren't right, Olivia, but I don't know. Sometimes I think it isn't right, either, to bring them into the world when there is no welcome for them." She struggled with the admission. "You and I, Olivia, we never got on together." "But that's all past now, mother." She clung to me for a while for reassurance. "I hope so, I hope so; but still there are things I've always wanted to tell you. When you wrote me about going on the stage ... there are wild things in you, Olivia, things I never looked for in a daughter of mine, things I can't understand nor account for unless--unless it was I turned you against life ... my kind of life ... before you were born. Many's the time I've seen you hating it and I've been harsh with you; but I wanted you should know I was being harsh with myself ..." "Mother, dear, is it good for you to talk so?"