dear my children are to me, but Amy is the dearest of all. She is
dearer to me, Robert, than you yourself.'

COLONEL. 'Very well, memsahib.'

ALICE. 'Robert dear, Amy has come to a time in her life when she is
neither quite a girl nor quite a woman. There are dark places before
us at that age through which we have to pick our way without much
help. I can conceive dead mothers haunting those places to watch how
their child is to fare in them. Very frightened ghosts, Robert. I have
thought so long of how I was to be within hail of my girl at this
time, holding her hand--my Amy, my child.'

COLONEL. 'That is just how it is all to turn out, my Alice.'

ALICE, shivering, 'Yes, isn't it, isn't it?'

COLONEL. 'You dear excitable, of course it is.'

ALICE, like one defying him, 'But even though it were not, though I
had come back too late, though my daughter had become a woman without
a mother's guidance, though she were a bad woman--'

COLONEL. 'Alice.'

ALICE. 'Though some cur of a man--Robert, it wouldn't affect my love
for her, I should love her more than ever. If all others turned from
her, if you turned from her, Robert--how I should love her then.'

COLONEL. 'Alice, don't talk of such things.'