Page 140 - sons-and-lovers

the country, or reading, or painting.
‘What do you want to be?’ his mother asked.
‘Anything.’
‘That is no answer,’ said Mrs. Morel.
But it was quite truthfully the only answer he could give.
His ambition, as far as this world’s gear went, was quietly
to earn his thirty or thirty-five shillings a week somewhere
near home, and then, when his father died, have a cottage
with his mother, paint and go out as he liked, and live happy
ever after. That was his programme as far as doing things
went. But he was proud within himself, measuring peo-
ple against himself, and placing them, inexorably. And he
thought that PERHAPS he might also make a painter, the
real thing. But that he left alone.
‘Then,’ said his mother, ‘you must look in the paper for
the advertisements.’
He looked at her. It seemed to him a bitter humiliation
and an anguish to go through. But he said nothing. When
he got up in the morning, his whole being was knotted up
over this one thought:
‘I’ve got to go and look for advertisements for a job.’
It stood in front of the morning, that thought, killing all
joy and even life, for him. His heart felt like a tight knot.
And then, at ten o’clock, he set off. He was supposed to be
a queer, quiet child. Going up the sunny street of the little
town, he felt as if all the folk he met said to themselves: ‘He’s
going to the Co-op. reading-room to look in the papers for a
place. He can’t get a job. I suppose he’s living on his mother.’
Then he crept up the stone stairs behind the drapery shop

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