Page 337 - sons-and-lovers

cruelty and his hatred of her. She never realised in a flash.
Over everything she brooded and brooded.
After tea he stayed with Edgar and the brothers, tak-
ing no notice of Miriam. She, extremely unhappy on this
looked-for holiday, waited for him. And at last he yielded
and came to her. She was determined to track this mood
of his to its origin. She counted it not much more than a
mood.
‘Shall we go through the wood a little way?’ she asked
him, knowing he never refused a direct request.
They went down to the warren. On the middle path they
passed a trap, a narrow horseshoe hedge of small fir-boughs,
baited with the guts of a rabbit. Paul glanced at it frowning.
She caught his eye.
‘Isn’t it dreadful?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know! Is it worse than a weasel with its teeth in
a rabbit’s throat? One weasel or many rabbits? One or the
other must go!’
He was taking the bitterness of life badly. She was rather
sorry for him.
‘We will go back to the house,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to
walk out.’
They went past the lilac-tree, whose bronze leaf-buds
were coming unfastened. Just a fragment remained of the
haystack, a monument squared and brown, like a pillar of
stone. There was a little bed of hay from the last cutting.
‘Let us sit here a minute,’ said Miriam.
He sat down against his will, resting his back against the
hard wall of hay. They faced the amphitheatre of round hills

Sons and Lovers