Page 188 - lady-chatterlys-lover

scribbling fellows were something else. Towards Connie
the Squire was always rather gallant; he thought her an at-
tractive demure maiden and rather wasted on Clifford, and
it was a thousand pities she stood no chance of bringing
forth an heir to Wragby. He himself had no heir.
Connie wondered what he would say if he knew that Clif-
ford’s game-keeper had been having intercourse with her,
and saying to her ‘tha mun come to th’ cottage one time.’
He would detest and despise her, for he had come almost
to hate the shoving forward of the working classes. A man
of her own class he would not mind, for Connie was gifted
from nature with this appearance of demure, submissive
maidenliness, and perhaps it was part of her nature. Winter
called her ‘dear child’ and gave her a rather lovely minia-
ture of an eighteenth-century lady, rather against her will.
But Connie was preoccupied with her affair with the
keeper. After all, Mr Winter, who was really a gentleman
and a man of the world, treated her as a person and a dis-
criminating individual; he did not lump her together with
all the rest of his female womanhood in his ‘thee’ and ‘tha’.
She did not go to the wood that day nor the next, nor the
day following. She did not go so long as she felt, or imag-
ined she felt, the man waiting for her, wanting her. But the
fourth day she was terribly unsettled and uneasy. She still
refused to go to the wood and open her thighs once more
to the man. She thought of all the things she might do—
drive to Sheffield, pay visits, and the thought of all these
things was repellent. At last she decided to take a walk, not
towards the wood, but in the opposite direction; she would

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