'That he never will!' The fierce egoism of the consciously weak flamed
up in her. 'I keep myself to myself,' she finished.

'If such things come to pass, mother,' Albert said, and his eyes looked
suddenly vivid, so that Hazel clapped her hands and said, 'Yer lamps
are lit! Yer lamps are lit!' and broke into peals of laughter. 'If such
a thing comes to pass,' laboured Albert, 'they'll come decent, that is,
they won't be spoken of.'

He voiced his own and his mother's creed.

At this point the argument ended, because Albert had to go back after
tea to finish some work. As he stamped innumerable swans on the
yielding material, he never doubted that his mother had also yielded.
He forgot that life had to be shaped with an axe till the chips fly.

As soon as he had gone, Mrs. Prowde shut the door on Hazel hastily, for
fear the weather might bring relenting. She had other views for Albert.
In after years, when the consequences of her action had become things
of the past, she always spoke of how she had done her best with Hazel.
She never dreamed that she, by her selfishness that night, had herself
set Hazel's feet in the dark and winding path that she must tread from
that night onward to its hidden, shadowy ending. Mrs. Prowde, through
her many contented years, blamed in turn Hazel, Abel, Albert, the
devil, and (only tacitly and, as it were, in secret from herself) God.
If there is any purgatorial fire of remorse for the hard and selfish
natures that crucify love, it must burn elsewhere. It does not touch
them in this world. They go as the three children went, in their coats,
their hosen, and their hats all complete, nor does the smell of fire
pass over them.