I lifted up my voice and wept, and laughed, To heaven, not her, until it tore my throat. ‘Confess, confess!’ what was there to confess, Except man’s cruelty, except my wrong? Except this anguish, or this ecstasy? This shame, or glory? The light woman there Was small to take it in: an acorn-cup Would take the sea in sooner. ‘Good,’ she cried; Unmarried and a mother, and she laughs! These unchaste girls are always impudent. Get out, intriguer! leave my house, and trot: I wonder you should look me in the face, With such a filthy secret.’ ‘Then I rolled My scanty bundle up, and went my way, Washed white with weeping, shuddering head and foot With blind hysteric passion, staggering forth Beyond those doors. ’Twas natural, of course, She should not ask me where I meant to sleep; I might sleep well beneath the heavy Seine, Like others of my sort; the bed was laid For us. But any woman, womanly, Had thought of him who should be in a month, The sinless babe that should be in a month, And if by chance he might be warmer housed Than underneath such dreary, dripping eaves.’ I broke on Marian there. ‘Yet she herself, A wife, I think, had scandals of her own, A lover, not her husband.’ ‘Ay,’ she said, ‘But gold and meal are measured otherwise; I learnt so much at school,’ said Marian Erle. ‘O crooked world,’ I cried, ‘ridiculous If not so lamentable! It’s the way With these light women of a thrifty vice, My Marian,—always hard upon the rent In any sister’s virtue! while they keep Their chastity so darned with perfidy, That, though a rag itself, it looks as well Across a street, in balcony or coach, As any stronger stuff might. For my part, I’d rather take the wind-side of the stews Than touch such women with my finger-end! They top the poor street-walker by their lie, And look the better for being so much worse: The devil’s most devilish when respectable. But you, dear, and your story.’ ‘All the rest Is here,’ she said, and signed upon the child. ‘I found a mistress-sempstress who was kind And let me sew in peace among her girls; And what was better than to draw the threads All day and half the night, for him, and him? And so I lived for him, and so he lives, And so I know, by this time, God lives too.’