..
Goneril:
You are too noisy. Must I make you go?
Cordeil's Voice:
Mother, Goneril is unkind to me.
Hygd (raising herself in bed excitedly, and speaking so vehemently that
her utterance strangles itself):
Go, go, thou evil child, thou ill-comer.
[GONERIL, with a sudden strong movement, shuts the resisting door and
holds it rigidly. The little hands beat on it madly for a moment, then
the child's voice is heard in a retreating wail.]
Goneril:
Though she is wilful, obeying only the King,
She is a very little child, mother,
To be so bitterly thought of.
Hygd:
Because a woman gives herself for ever
Cordeil the useless had to be conceived
(Like an after-thought that deceives nobody)
To keep her father from another woman.
And I lie here.
Goneril (after a silence):
Hard and unjust my father has been to me;
Yet that has knitted up within my mind
A love of coldness and a love of him
Who makes me firm, wary, swift and secret,
Until I feel if I become a mother
I shall at need be cruel to my children,
And ever cold, to string their natures harder
And make them able to endure men's deeds;
But now I wonder if injustice
Keeps house with baseness, taught by kinship--
I never thought a king could be untrue,
I never thought my father was unclean .
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