Page 304 - sons-and-lovers

clear. It might have been the body of a man of twenty-eight,
except that there were, perhaps, too many blue scars, like
tattoo-marks, where the coal-dust remained under the skin,
and that his chest was too hairy. But he put his hand on his
side ruefully. It was his fixed belief that, because be did not
get fat, he was as thin as a starved rat. Paul looked at his fa-
ther’s thick, brownish hands all scarred, with broken nails,
rubbing the fine smoothness of his sides, and the incongru-
ity struck him. It seemed strange they were the same flesh.
‘I suppose,’ he said to his father, ‘you had a good figure
once.’
‘Eh!’ exclaimed the miner, glancing round, startled and
timid, like a child.
‘He had,’ exclaimed Mrs. Morel, ‘if he didn’t hurtle him-
self up as if he was trying to get in the smallest space he
could.’
‘Me!’ exclaimed Morel—‘me a good figure! I wor niver
much more n’r a skeleton.’
‘Man!’ cried his wife, ‘don’t be such a pulamiter!’
‘Strewth!’ he said. ‘Tha’s niver knowed me but what I
looked as if I wor goin’ off in a rapid decline.’
She sat and laughed.
‘You’ve had a constitution like iron,’ she said; ‘and never
a man had a better start, if it was body that counted. You
should have seen him as a young man,’ she cried suddenly
to Paul, drawing herself up to imitate her husband’s once
handsome bearing.
Morel watched her shyly. He saw again the passion she
had had for him. It blazed upon her for a moment. He was

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