Page 229 - sons-and-lovers

‘But they’re so hateful!’ cried Miriam, ‘and—and LOW.’
‘Yes, dear. But how often have I asked you not to answer
Edgar back? Can’t you let him say what he likes?’
‘But why should he say what he likes?’
‘Aren’t you strong enough to bear it, Miriam, if even
for my sake? Are you so weak that you must wrangle with
them?’
Mrs. Leivers stuck unflinchingly to this doctrine of ‘the
other cheek”. She could not instil it at all into the boys. With
the girls she succeeded better, and Miriam was the child of
her heart. The boys loathed the other cheek when it was pre-
sented to them. Miriam was often sufficiently lofty to turn
it. Then they spat on her and hated her. But she walked in
her proud humility, living within herself.
There was always this feeling of jangle and discord in the
Leivers family. Although the boys resented so bitterly this
eternal appeal to their deeper feelings of resignation and
proud humility, yet it had its effect on them. They could not
establish between themselves and an outsider just the or-
dinary human feeling and unexaggerated friendship; they
were always restless for the something deeper. Ordinary
folk seemed shallow to them, trivial and inconsiderable.
And so they were unaccustomed, painfully uncouth in the
simplest social intercourse, suffering, and yet insolent in
their superiority. Then beneath was the yearning for the
soul-intimacy to which they could not attain because they
were too dumb, and every approach to close connection
was blocked by their clumsy contempt of other people. They
wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even nor-

Sons and Lovers