Page 230 - sons-and-lovers

mally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first
steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common hu-
man intercourse.
Paul fell under Mrs. Leivers’s spell. Everything had a re-
ligious and intensified meaning when he was with her. His
soul, hurt, highly developed, sought her as if for nourish-
ment. Together they seemed to sift the vital fact from an
experience.
Miriam was her mother’s daughter. In the sunshine of
the afternoon mother and daughter went down the fields
with him. They looked for nests. There was a jenny wren’s in
the hedge by the orchard.
‘I DO want you to see this,’ said Mrs. Leivers.
He crouched down and carefully put his finger through
the thorns into the round door of the nest.
‘It’s almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of
the bird,’ he said, ‘it’s so warm. They say a bird makes its
nest round like a cup with pressing its breast on it. Then
how did it make the ceiling round, I wonder?’
The nest seemed to start into life for the two women. Af-
ter that, Miriam came to see it every day. It seemed so close
to her. Again, going down the hedgeside with the girl, he
noticed the celandines, scalloped splashes of gold, on the
side of the ditch.
‘I like them,’ he said, ‘when their petals go flat back with
the sunshine. They seemed to be pressing themselves at the
sun.’
And then the celandines ever after drew her with a lit-
tle spell. Anthropomorphic as she was, she stimulated him