The Mother by Pearl S. Buck

Crazed with her weariness was the mother when she came down from the halting gray ass that night before her own door. She had wept all the way home, now aloud and now softly, and the young man had been beside himself again and again with his mother's weeping. He cried out in an agony at last, "Cease your wailing, mother, or I shall not be able to bear it!"

But when she calmed herself a little for his sake she broke forth again and at last the young man ground his teeth together and he muttered wildly, "If the day were come, if we were not so miserably poor, if the poor were given their share and could defend themselves, then might we sue for my sister's life! But what use when we are so poor and there is no justice in the land?"