Page 293 - lady-chatterlys-lover

’It wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it?’ he said.
He had pulled off his boots, and put on a pair of slippers.
He stood up on the chair, and lifted down the photograph.
It left a big pale place on the greenish wall-paper.
’No use dusting it now,’ he said, setting the thing against
the wall.
He went to the scullery, and returned with hammer and
pincers. Sitting where he had sat before, he started to tear
off the back-paper from the big frame, and to pull out the
sprigs that held the backboard in position, working with the
immediate quiet absorption that was characteristic of him.
He soon had the nails out: then he pulled out the back-
boards, then the enlargement itself, in its solid white mount.
He looked at the photograph with amusement.
’Shows me for what I was, a young curate, and her for
what she was, a bully,’ he said. ‘The prig and the bully!’
’Let me look!’ said Connie.
He did look indeed very clean-shaven and very clean al-
together, one of the clean young men of twenty years ago.
But even in the photograph his eyes were alert and daunt-
less. And the woman was not altogether a bully, though her
jowl was heavy. There was a touch of appeal in her.
’One never should keep these things,’ said Connie. ‘That
one shouldn’t! One should never have them made!’
He broke the cardboard photograph and mount over his
knee, and when it was small enough, put it on the fire.
’It’ll spoil the fire though,’ he said.
The glass and the backboard he carefully took upstairs.
The frame he knocked asunder with a few blows of the

Lady Chatterly’s Lover