Page 237 - sons-and-lovers

were wonderful to her, and distinct. He packed his box and
rose. Suddenly he looked at her.
‘Why are you always sad?’ he asked her.
‘Sad!’ she exclaimed, looking up at him with startled,
wonderful brown eyes.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘You are always sad.’
‘I am not—oh, not a bit!’ she cried.
‘But even your joy is like a flame coming off of sadness,’
he persisted. ‘You’re never jolly, or even just all right.’
‘No,’ she pondered. ‘I wonder—why?’
‘Because you’re not; because you’re different inside, like
a pine-tree, and then you flare up; but you’re not just like an
ordinary tree, with fidgety leaves and jolly—-‘
He got tangled up in his own speech; but she brooded on
it, and he had a strange, roused sensation, as if his feelings
were new. She got so near him. It was a strange stimulant.
Then sometimes he hated her. Her youngest brother was
only five. He was a frail lad, with immense brown eyes in
his quaint fragile face—one of Reynolds’s ‘Choir of Angels’,
with a touch of elf. Often Miriam kneeled to the child and
drew him to her.
‘Eh, my Hubert!’ she sang, in a voice heavy and sur-
charged with love. ‘Eh, my Hubert!’
And, folding him in her arms, she swayed slightly from
side to side with love, her face half lifted, her eyes half closed,
her voice drenched with love.
‘Don’t!’ said the child, uneasy—‘don’t, Miriam!’
‘Yes; you love me, don’t you?’ she murmured deep in her
throat, almost as if she were in a trance, and swaying also as

Sons and Lovers