Page 500 - women-in-love

ways so completely controlled, yet so bitterly nervous.
‘No, I won’t,’ he replied.
So, with a curious humility, she placed him the little cup
of coffee, and herself took the awkward tumbler. She seemed
to want to serve him.
‘Why don’t you give me the glass—it is so clumsy for
you,’ he said. He would much rather have had it, and seen
her daintily served. But she was silent, pleased with the dis-
parity, with her self-abasement.
‘You are quite EN MENAGE,’ he said.
‘Yes. We aren’t really at home to visitors,’ said Winifred.
‘You’re not? Then I’m an intruder?’
For once he felt his conventional dress was out of place,
he was an outsider.
Gudrun was very quiet. She did not feel drawn to talk to
him. At this stage, silence was best—or mere light words. It
was best to leave serious things aside. So they talked gaily
and lightly, till they heard the man below lead out the horse,
and call it to ‘back-back!’ into the dog-cart that was to take
Gudrun home. So she put on her things, and shook hands
with Gerald, without once meeting his eyes. And she was
gone.
The funeral was detestable. Afterwards, at the tea-table,
the daughters kept saying—‘He was a good father to us—the
best father in the world’—or else—‘We shan’t easily find an-
other man as good as father was.’
Gerald acquiesced in all this. It was the right conven-
tional attitude, and, as far as the world went, he believed in
the conventions. He took it as a matter of course. But Wini-

500 Women in Love