ALICE. 'How can you be so hard! My child, I am not saying one harsh word to you. I am asking you only to hide your head upon your mother's breast.' AMY. 'I decline.' ALICE. 'Take care, Amy, or I shall begin to believe that your father was right. What do you think would happen if I were to leave you to him!' AMY. 'Poor father.' ALICE. 'Poor indeed with such a daughter.' AMY. 'He has gone, mother; so do you really think you need keep up this pretence before me?' ALICE. 'Amy, what you need is a whipping.' AMY. 'You ought to know what I need.' The agonised mother again tries to envelop her unnatural child. ALICE. 'Amy, Amy, it was all Steve's fault.' AMY, struggling as with a boa constrictor, 'You needn't expect me to believe that.' ALICE. 'No doubt you thought at the beginning that he was a gallant gentleman.' AMY. 'Not at all; I knew he was depraved from the moment I set eyes on him.' ALICE. 'My Amy! Then how--how--' AMY. 'Ginevra knew too.' ALICE. 'She knew!' AMY. 'We planned it together--to treat him in the same way as Sir Harry Paskill and Ralph Devereux.' ALICE. 'Amy, you are not in your senses. You don't mean that there were others?' AMY. 'There was Major--Major--I forget his name, but he was another.' ALICE, shaking her, 'Wretched girl.' AMY. 'Leave go.'