Page 377 - sons-and-lovers

‘And you think I’d let a wife take me from you?’
‘Well, you wouldn’t ask her to marry your mother as well
as you,’ Mrs. Morel smiled.
‘She could do what she liked; she wouldn’t have to in-
terfere.’
‘She wouldn’t—till she’d got you—and then you’d see.’
‘I never will see. I’ll never marry while I’ve got you—I
won’t.’
‘But I shouldn’t like to leave you with nobody, my boy,’
she cried.
‘You’re not going to leave me. What are you? Fifty-three!
I’ll give you till seventy-five. There you are, I’m fat and for-
ty-four. Then I’ll marry a staid body. See!’
His mother sat and laughed.
‘Go to bed,’ she said—‘go to bed.’
‘And we’ll have a pretty house, you and me, and a ser-
vant, and it’ll be just all right. I s’ll perhaps be rich with my
painting.’
‘Will you go to bed!’
‘And then you s’ll have a pony-carriage. See yourself—a
little Queen Victoria trotting round.’
‘I tell you to go to bed,’ she laughed.
He kissed her and went. His plans for the future were al-
ways the same.
Mrs. Morel sat brooding—about her daughter, about
Paul, about Arthur. She fretted at losing Annie. The family
was very closely bound. And she felt she MUST live now, to
be with her children. Life was so rich for her. Paul wanted
her, and so did Arthur. Arthur never knew how deeply he

Sons and Lovers