Sons and Lovers - Daimon Club

with wonderful healing flesh, and so I see no reason why it SHOULD
take bad ways. Of course there's a wound---"
She was pale now with emotion and anxiety. The three children
realised that it was very bad for their father, and the house
was silent, anxious.
"But he always gets better," said Paul after a while.
"That's what I tell him," said the mother.
Everybody moved about in silence.
"And he really looked nearly done for," she said. "But the
Sister says that is the pain."
Annie took away her mother's coat and bonnet.
"And he looked at me when I came away! I said: 'I s'll
have to go now, Walter, because of the train--and the children.'
And he looked at me. It seems hard."
Paul took up his brush again and went on painting. Arthur went
outside for some coal. Annie sat looking dismal. And Mrs. Morel,
in her little rocking-chair that her husband had made for her
when the first baby was coming, remained motionless, brooding.
She was grieved, and bitterly sorry for the man who was hurt so much.
But still, in her heart of hearts, where the love should have burned,
there was a blank. Now, when all her woman's pity was roused to its
full extent, when she would have slaved herself to death to nurse
him and to save him, when she would have taken the pain herself,
if she could, somewhere far away inside her, she felt indifferent
to him and to his suffering. It hurt her most of all, this failure
to love him, even when he roused her strong emotions. She brooded
a while.
"And there," she said suddenly, "when I'd got halfway to Keston,
I found I'd come out in my working boots--and LOOK at them."
They were an old pair of Paul's, brown and rubbed through at
the toes. "I didn't know what to do with myself, for shame,"
she added.
In the morning, when Annie and Arthur were at school, Mrs. Morel
talked again to her son, who was helping her with her housework.
"I found Barker at the hospital. He did look bad,
poor little fellow! 'Well,' I said to him, 'what sort of a
journey did you have with him?' 'Dunna ax me, missis!' he said.
'Ay,' I said, 'I know what he'd be.' 'But it WOR bad for him,