Page 273 - sons-and-lovers

shillings a week per person. He and Leonard went bathing
in the mornings. Morel was wandering abroad quite early.
‘You, Paul,’ his mother called from the bedroom, ‘eat a
piece of bread-and-butter.’
‘All right,’ he answered.
And when he got back he saw his mother presiding in
state at the breakfast-table. The woman of the house was
young. Her husband was blind, and she did laundry work.
So Mrs. Morel always washed the pots in the kitchen and
made the beds.
‘But you said you’d have a real holiday,’ said Paul, ‘and
now you work.’
‘Work!’ she exclaimed. ‘What are you talking about!’
He loved to go with her across the fields to the village and
the sea. She was afraid of the plank bridge, and he abused
her for being a baby. On the whole he stuck to her as if he
were HER man.
Miriam did not get much of him, except, perhaps, when
all the others went to the ‘Coons”. Coons were insufferably
stupid to Miriam, so he thought they were to himself also,
and he preached priggishly to Annie about the fatuity of lis-
tening to them. Yet he, too, knew all their songs, and sang
them along the roads roisterously. And if he found himself
listening, the stupidity pleased him very much. Yet to An-
nie he said:
‘Such rot! there isn’t a grain of intelligence in it. Nobody
with more gumption than a grasshopper could go and sit
and listen.’ And to Miriam he said, with much scorn of An-
nie and the others: ‘I suppose they’re at the ‘Coons’.’

Sons and Lovers