Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman
my head if Will’s happiness depended on it. You are good enough to talk about my “sacrifices”, but am I being anything more than normal, natural and consistent, a mother brought up in a certain school of a certain period?
I think that, if the facts were ever known, you would find I had been loyal to my principles. They never will be—for obvious reasons. . . With you, of course, it is different; I have told you everything and laid my heart bare. Should I have done that, if there was anything to conceal? And if the last chapter would really interest you. . .
A superficial change undoubtedly there has been, corresponding to a profound change in all our conditions. A year or two ago. . . It is not too much to call it a revolution, so many unexpected things have happened. In those days one never dreamed that my brother-in-law would drag what I suppose I must call his “honour” through the Divorce Court; and, so long as poor Kathleen bore him one daughter after another, it seemed safe to presume that Cheniston and the title would come sooner or later to Arthur and, through him, to our boy. The problem of that period was to “carry on”, as Will would say; my brother Brackenbury and his wife would not like to be called mean, but they were certainly careful, and it was only by eternal pinching and
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