Page 424 - sons-and-lovers

him quite plain.
Mrs. Dawes and he had many periods of coolness, when
they saw little of each other; but they always came together
again.
‘Were you horrid with Baxter Dawes?’ he asked her. It
was a thing that seemed to trouble him.
‘In what way?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. But weren’t you horrid with him?
Didn’t you do something that knocked him to pieces?’
‘What, pray?’
‘Making him feel as if he were nothing—I know,’ Paul
declared.
‘You are so clever, my friend,’ she said coolly.
The conversation broke off there. But it made her cool
with him for some time.
She very rarely saw Miriam now. The friendship between
the two women was not broken off, but considerably weak-
ened.
‘Will you come in to the concert on Sunday afternoon?’
Clara asked him just after Christmas.
‘I promised to go up to Willey Farm,’ he replied.
‘Oh, very well.’
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asked.
‘Why should I?’ she answered.
Which almost annoyed him.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘Miriam and I have been a lot to each
other ever since I was sixteen—that’s seven years now.’
‘It’s a long time,’ Clara replied.
‘Yes; but somehow she—it doesn’t go right—-‘