ourself: _I_ don't want you. But listen to
this. Do you know what I would do with you if you were a baby again?
aye, as sure as there's a Heaven above us.

VIVIE. Strangle me, perhaps.

MRS WARREN. No: I'd bring you up to be a real daughter to me, and not
what you are now, with your pride and your prejudices and the college
education you stole from me: yes, stole: deny it if you can: what was it
but stealing? I'd bring you up in my own house, I would.

VIVIE [quietly] In one of your own houses.

MRS WARREN [screaming] Listen to her! listen to how she spits on her
mother's grey hairs! Oh, may you live to have your own daughter tear and
trample on you as you have trampled on me. And you will: you will. No
woman ever had luck with a mother's curse on her.

VIVIE. I wish you wouldn't rant, mother. It only hardens me. Come: I
suppose I am the only young woman you ever had in your power that you
did good to. Don't spoil it all now.

MRS WARREN. Yes, Heaven forgive me, it's true; and you are the only
one that ever turned on me. Oh, the injustice of it! the injustice! the
injustice! I always wanted to be a good woman. I tried honest work; and
I was slave-driven until I cursed the day I ever heard of honest work. I
was a good mother; and because I made my daughter a good woman she turns
me out as if I were a leper. Oh, if I only had my life to live over
again! I'd talk to that lying clergyman in the school. From this time
forth, so help me Heaven in my last hour, I'll do wrong and nothing but
wrong. And I'll prosper on it.

VIVIE. Yes: it's better to choose your line and go through with it. If
I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not
have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional
woman at heart. That is why I am bidding you goodbye now. I am right, am
I not?

MRS WARREN [taken aback] Right to throw away all my money!

VIVIE. No: right to get rid of you? I should be a fool not to. Isn't that
so?

MRS WARREN [sulkily] Oh well, yes, if you come to that, I suppose you
are. But Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing!
And now I'd better go than stay where I'm not wanted. [She turns to the
door].

VIVIE [kindly] Won't you shake hands?

MRS WARREN [after looking at her fiercely for a moment with a savage
impulse to strike her] No, thank you. Goodbye.

VIVIE [matter-of-factly] Goodbye. [Mrs Warren goes out, slamming
the door behind her. The strain