Page 274 - sons-and-lovers

It was queer to see Miriam singing coon songs. She had
a straight chin that went in a perpendicular line from the
lower lip to the turn. She always reminded Paul of some sad
Botticelli angel when she sang, even when it was:
‘Come down lover’s lane
For a walk with me, talk with me.’
Only when he sketched, or at evening when the others
were at the ‘Coons’, she had him to herself. He talked to her
endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great
levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the
eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of
the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping
forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody
knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines
and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven
and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine. Him-
self, he said, was Norman, Miriam was Gothic. She bowed
in consent even to that.
One evening he and she went up the great sweeping
shore of sand towards Theddlethorpe. The long breakers
plunged and ran in a hiss of foam along the coast. It was
a warm evening. There was not a figure but themselves on
the far reaches of sand, no noise but the sound of the sea.
Paul loved to see it clanging at the land. He loved to feel
himself between the noise of it and the silence of the sandy
shore. Miriam was with him. Everything grew very intense.
It was quite dark when they turned again. The way home
was through a gap in the sandhills, and then along a raised
grass road between two dykes. The country was black and