Elliott and I have broken our engagement.

Why have you done that?

Because I don't love him.

Have you no sense of obligation to your family or to me? Here you have the chance to join our name Vale with one of the finest families in the city, Livingston, and you come in here to tell me that you aren't in love. You're behaving like a romantic girl of eighteen.

I don't doubt it.

And what do you intend to do with your life?

Get a cat and a parrot and live alone in single blessedness.

Stop rocking! You've never done anything to make your mother proud, or to make yourself proud either. Why, I should think you'd be ashamed to be born and live all your life as Charlotte Vale. Miss Charlotte Vale.

Dr. Jaquith says that tyranny is sometimes an expression of the maternal instinct. If that's a mother's love, I want no part of it. [Rising to her feet] I didn't want to be born. You didn't want me to be born either. It's been a calamity on both sides.

[Mrs. Vale suffers a fatal stroke and heart attack and dies]

Oh mother, let's not quarrel. We've been getting along together so well lately. It was a horrid ... thing to say.