shopgirls, or barmaids, or waitresses, when we could trade in them
ourselves and get all the profits instead of starvation wages? Not
likely.

VIVIE. You were certainly quite justified--from the business point of
view.

MRS WARREN. Yes; or any other point of view. What is any respectable
girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man's fancy and get the
benefit of his money by marrying him?--as if a marriage ceremony
could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing! Oh, the
hypocrisy of the world makes me sick! Liz and I had to work and save and
calculate just like other people; elseways we should be as poor as any
good-for-nothing drunken waster of a woman that thinks her luck will
last for ever. [With great energy] I despise such people: theyve
no character; and if theres a thing I hate in a woman, it's want of
character.

VIVIE. Come now, mother: frankly! Isn't it part of what you call
character in a woman that she should greatly dislike such a way of
making money?

MRS WARREN. Why, of course. Everybody dislikes having to work and make
money; but they have to do it all the same. I'm sure I've often pitied
a poor girl, tired out and in low spirits, having to try to please some
man that she doesn't care two straws for--some half-drunken fool that
thinks he's making himself agreeable when he's teasing and worrying and
disgusting a woman so that hardly any money could pay her for putting up
with it. But she has to bear with disagreeables and take the rough with
the smooth, just like a nurse in a hospital or anyone else. It's not
work that any woman would do for pleasure, goodness knows; though to
hear the pious people talk you would suppose it was a bed of roses.

VIVIE. Still, you consider it worth while. It pays.

MRS WARREN. Of course it's worth while to a poor girl, if she can resist
temptation and is good-looking and well conducted and sensible. It's far
better than any other employment open to her.

I always thought that it oughtn't to be. It _can't_ be right, Vivie, that
there shouldn't be better opportunities for women. I stick to that: it's
wrong. But it's so, right or wrong; and a girl must make the best of it.
But of course it's not worth while for a lady. If you took to it youd be
a fool; but I should have been a fool if I'd taken to anything else.

VIVIE [more and more deeply moved] Mother: suppose we were both as poor
as you were in those wretched old days, are you quite sure that you