Page 336 - sons-and-lovers

ritably.
‘But I love to touch them,’ she replied, hurt.
‘Can you never like things without clutching them as if
you wanted to pull the heart out of them? Why don’t you
have a bit more restraint, or reserve, or something?’
She looked up at him full of pain, then continued slowly
to stroke her lips against a ruffled flower. Their scent, as she
smelled it, was so much kinder than he; it almost made her
cry.
‘You wheedle the soul out of things,’ he said. ‘I would
never wheedle—at any rate, I’d go straight.’
He scarcely knew what he was saying. These things
came from him mechanically. She looked at him. His body
seemed one weapon, firm and hard against her.
‘You’re always begging things to love you,’ he said, ‘as
if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to
fawn on them—-‘
Rhythmically, Miriam was swaying and stroking the
flower with her mouth, inhaling the scent which ever after
made her shudder as it came to her nostrils.
‘You don’t want to love—your eternal and abnormal
craving is to be loved. You aren’t positive, you’re negative.
You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love,
because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.’
She was stunned by his cruelty, and did not hear. He had
not the faintest notion of what he was saying. It was as if
his fretted, tortured soul, run hot by thwarted passion, jet-
ted off these sayings like sparks from electricity. She did not
grasp anything he said. She only sat crouched beneath his