Dear mother said she was truly gratified to find me flying to her bosom in my moments of peril, and told me, with beautiful affection, that she only lived for me and my father’s business now; though what with her duty to me and my husband, my coming to her did place her so awkwardly, that she really felt as if she was between two fires, and if she turned her face to one, she would have the other on her back. She said it all amounted to this--If she rowed in the same boat as myself, and went against Edward, she must run him down in my presence, which would pain her much to do; or else she must throw me overboard, and sink her own child in order to find favour in Mr. Sk--n--st--n’s eyes; so that I must see what a trying position hers was, and how wrong it was of me, as matters stood, to ask her to express any opinion upon my husband’s shameful, indecent, and, she would add, unmanly conduct. Of course, it would never do for her, she said, to tell me that he had behaved to me worse than a savage. But still this she would say, that if _her_ husband, my own father, had behaved to _her_ one half as brutally as Mr. Sk--n--st--n had to _me_, that she would not have stopped in the house of the monster another moment; and that though he had come after her the very next day, begging and praying of her to return--as of course he would--still she would have turned a deaf ear to all his entreaties, and insisted upon having a handsome separate maintenance from the wretch, and never willingly have set eyes upon him again. Not that she wished me to understand that she was counselling me to do anything of the kind--far from it; for, as she truly observed, she trusted she knew herself too well to be in any way instrumental to the separation of husband and wife; as it must be very clear to me, she added, that if through anything she said, I might be induced to pack up whatever dresses and jewellery Mr. Sk--n--st--n had presented me with, and leave my ungrateful husband for ever, that maybe, when my dear little innocent babe was born, I might repent of my rash step, and visit her with it. This, she told me, she felt would be a dreadful punishment to her, and a return, indeed, that she little dreamt of. So she really must again beg and pray to be allowed to remain perfectly neutral in the business; especially as from the insight she had had into Mr. Sk--n--st--n’s character of late, she was sure that he would not act towards me as he ought, but would settle on me an allowance that would scarcely procure me the common necessaries of life. And how I was to live then, she would not attempt to say.