Page 315 - women-in-love

he had felt inferior to them, as if they through poverty and
labour were nearer to God than he. He had always the un-
acknowledged belief, that it was his workmen, the miners,
who held in their hands the means of salvation. To move
nearer to God, he must move towards his miners, his life
must gravitate towards theirs. They were, unconsciously, his
idol, his God made manifest. In them he worshipped the
highest, the great, sympathetic, mindless Godhead of hu-
manity.
And all the while, his wife had opposed him like one of
the great demons of hell. Strange, like a bird of prey, with
the fascinating beauty and abstraction of a hawk, she had
beat against the bars of his philanthropy, and like a hawk
in a cage, she had sunk into silence. By force of circum-
stance, because all the world combined to make the cage
unbreakable, he had been too strong for her, he had kept
her prisoner. And because she was his prisoner, his passion
for her had always remained keen as death. He had always
loved her, loved her with intensity. Within the cage, she was
denied nothing, she was given all licence.
But she had gone almost mad. Of wild and overweening
temper, she could not bear the humiliation of her husband’s
soft, half-appealing kindness to everybody. He was not de-
ceived by the poor. He knew they came and sponged on
him, and whined to him, the worse sort; the majority, luck-
ily for him, were much too proud to ask for anything, much
too independent to come knocking at his door. But in Bel-
dover, as everywhere else, there were the whining, parasitic,
foul human beings who come crawling after charity, and

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