Page:Wilde - A Woman of no Importance, 1909.djvu/110

RhACT II. let me have him for a little now? He is quite as much mine as yours.

MRS. ARBUTHNOT Are you talking of the child you abandoned? Of the child who, as far as you are concerned, might have died of hunger and of want?

LORD ILLINGWORTH You forget, Rachel, it was you who left me. It was not I who left you.

MRS. ARBUTHNOT I left you because you refused to give the child a name. Before my son was born, I implored you to marry me.

LORD ILLINGWORTH I had no expectations then. And besides, Rachel, I wasn't much older than you were. I was only twenty-two. I was twenty-one, I believe, when the whole thing began in your father's garden.

MRS. ARBUTHNOT When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also. 92