Page 305 - sons-and-lovers

shy, rather scared, and humble. Yet again he felt his old
glow. And then immediately he felt the ruin he had made
during these years. He wanted to bustle about, to run away
from it.
‘Gi’e my back a bit of a wesh,’ he asked her.
His wife brought a well-soaped flannel and clapped it on
his shoulders. He gave a jump.
‘Eh, tha mucky little ‘ussy!’ he cried. ‘Cowd as death!’
‘You ought to have been a salamander,’ she laughed,
washing his back. It was very rarely she would do anything
so personal for him. The children did those things.
‘The next world won’t be half hot enough for you,’ she
added.
‘No,’ he said; ‘tha’lt see as it’s draughty for me.’
But she had finished. She wiped him in a desultory fash-
ion, and went upstairs, returning immediately with his
shifting-trousers. When he was dried he struggled into
his shirt. Then, ruddy and shiny, with hair on end, and his
flannelette shirt hanging over his pit-trousers, he stood
warming the garments he was going to put on. He turned
them, he pulled them inside out, he scorched them.
‘Goodness, man!’ cried Mrs. Morel, ‘get dressed!’
‘Should thee like to clap thysen into britches as cowd as
a tub o’ water?’ he said.
At last he took off his pit-trousers and donned decent
black. He did all this on the hearthrug, as he would have
done if Annie and her familiar friends had been present.
Mrs. Morel turned the bread in the oven. Then from the
red earthenware panchion of dough that stood in a corner

0 Sons and Lovers