You seem to think every woman ought to behave as shamefully as you did. JANET _(grimly)_ No, Hester. I don’t think that. To do as I did needs pluck and brains--and five hundred pounds. Everything most women haven’t got, poor things. So they must marry or remain childless. You must marry--the next curate. I suppose the Bulsteads will buy Mr. Brown a living as he’s marrying the plainest of the daughters. It’s the least they can do. But that’s no reason why _I_ should marry unless I choose. MRS. CLOUSTON Well, I’ve never heard of anything so disgraceful. I thought Janet at least had the grace to be ashamed of what she did! JANET _(genuinely astonished)_ Ashamed? Ashamed of wanting to have a child? What on earth were women created for, Aunt Harriet, if not to have children? MRS. CLOUSTON To _marry_ and have children. JANET _(with relentless logic)_ My dear Aunt Harriet, women had children thousands of years before marriage was invented. I dare say they will go on doing so thousands of years after it has ceased to exist. MRS. DE MULLIN Janet! JANET Well, mother, that’s how I feel. And I believe it’s how all wholesome women feel if they would only acknowledge it. I _wanted_ to have a child. I always did from the time when I got too old to play with dolls. Not an adopted child or a child of some one else’s, but a baby of my very own. Of course I wanted to marry. That’s the ordinary way a woman wants to be a mother nowadays, I suppose. But time went on and nobody came forward, and I saw myself getting old and my chance slipping away. Then I met-never mind. And I fell in love with him. Or perhaps I only fell in love with love. I don’t know. It was so splendid to find some one at last who really cared for me as women should be cared for! Not to talk to because I was clever or to play tennis with because I was strong, but to kiss me and to make love to me! Yes! To make love to me! DE MULLIN _(solemnly)_ Listen to me, my girl. You say that now, and I dare say you believe it. But when you are older, when Johnny is grown up, you will bitterly repent having brought into the world a child who can call no man father. JANET _(passionately)_ Never! Never! That I’m sure of. Whatever happens, even if Johnny should come to hate me for what I did, I shall always be glad to have been his mother. At least I shall have lived. These poor women who go through life listless and dull, who have never felt the joys and the pains a mother feels, how they would envy me if they knew! If they knew! To know that a child is your very own, is a part of you. That you have faced sickness and pain and death itself for it. That it is yours and nothing can take it from you because no one can understand its wants as you do. To feel it’s soft breath on your cheek, to soothe it when it is fretful and still it when it cries, that is motherhood and that is glorious!