Page 397 - sons-and-lovers

fast. For a time he chafed, was irritable with his young wife,
who loved him; he went almost distracted when the baby,
which was delicate, cried or gave trouble. He grumbled for
hours to his mother. She only said: ‘Well, my lad, you did it
yourself, now you must make the best of it.’ And then the
grit came out in him. He buckled to work, undertook his
responsibilities, acknowledged that he belonged to his wife
and child, and did make a good best of it. He had never been
very closely inbound into the family. Now he was gone al-
together.
The months went slowly along. Paul had more or less
got into connection with the Socialist, Suffragette, Unitar-
ian people in Nottingham, owing to his acquaintance with
Clara. One day a friend of his and of Clara’s, in Bestwood,
asked him to take a message to Mrs. Dawes. He went in the
evening across Sneinton Market to Bluebell Hill. He found
the house in a mean little street paved with granite cobbles
and having causeways of dark blue, grooved bricks. The
front door went up a step from off this rough pavement,
where the feet of the passersby rasped and clattered. The
brown paint on the door was so old that the naked wood
showed between the rents. He stood on the street below and
knocked. There came a heavy footstep; a large, stout woman
of about sixty towered above him. He looked up at her from
the pavement. She had a rather severe face.
She admitted him into the parlour, which opened on to
the street. It was a small, stuffy, defunct room, of mahogany,
and deathly enlargements of photographs of departed peo-
ple done in carbon. Mrs. Radford left him. She was stately,

Sons and Lovers