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 wouldn’t advise me to try the Waterloo bar, or marry a laborer, or even go into the factory?

MRS WARREN [indignantly] Of course not.  What sort of mother do you take me for!  How could you keep your self-respect in such starvation and slavery?  And whats a woman worth? whats life worth? without self-respect!  Why am I independent and able to give my daughter a first-rate education, when other women that had just as good opportunities are in the gutter?  Because I always knew how to respect myself and control myself.  Why is Liz looked up to in a cathedral town?  The same reason.  Where would we be now if we’d minded the clergyman’s foolishness?  Scrubbing floors for one and sixpence