Page 418 - sons-and-lovers

of paints, all the girls. They’re jealous of you’—he felt her
stiffen coldly at the word ‘jealous’—‘merely because I some-
times bring you a book,’ he added slowly. ‘But, you see, it’s
only a trifle. Don’t bother about it, will you—because’—he
laughed quickly—‘well, what would they say if they saw us
here now, in spite of their victory?’
She was angry with him for his clumsy reference to their
present intimacy. It was almost insolent of him. Yet he was
so quiet, she forgave him, although it cost her an effort.
Their two hands lay on the rough stone parapet of the
Castle wall. He had inherited from his mother a fineness
of mould, so that his hands were small and vigorous. Hers
were large, to match her large limbs, but white and powerful
looking. As Paul looked at them he knew her. ‘She is wanting
somebody to take her hands—for all she is so contemptuous
of us,’ he said to himself. And she saw nothing but his two
hands, so warm and alive, which seemed to live for her. He
was brooding now, staring out over the country from under
sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had
vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark
matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and
the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only
shapen differently. And now that the forms seemed to have
melted away, there remained the mass from which all the
landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain.
The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church,
the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere—dark,
brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.
‘Is that two o’clock striking?’ Mrs. Dawes said in sur-

1