Page 122 - lady-chatterlys-lover

Chapter 8

rs Bolton also kept a cherishing eye on Connie, feeling
Mshe must extend to her her female and professional
protection. She was always urging her ladyship to walk out,
to drive to Uthwaite, to be in the air. For Connie had got
into the habit of sitting still by the fire, pretending to read;
or to sew feebly, and hardly going out at all.
It was a blowy day soon after Hilda had gone, that Mrs
Bolton said: ‘Now why don’t you go for a walk through the
wood, and look at the daffs behind the keeper’s cottage?
They’re the prettiest sight you’d see in a day’s march. And
you could put some in your room; wild daffs are always so
cheerful-looking, aren’t they?’
Connie took it in good part, even daffs for daffodils.
Wild daffodils! After all, one could not stew in one’s own
juice. The spring came back...’Seasons return, but not to me
returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn.’
And the keeper, his thin, white body, like a lonely pistil of
an invisible flower! She had forgotten him in her unspeak-
able depression. But now something roused...’Pale beyond
porch and portal’...the thing to do was to pass the porches
and the portals.
She was stronger, she could walk better, and iii the wood
the wind would not be so tiring as it was across the bark,
flatten against her. She wanted to forget, to forget the world,

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