Sons and Lovers - Daimon Club

"But I love to touch them," she replied, hurt.
"Can you never like things without clutching them as if you
wanted to pull the heart out of them? Why don't you have a bit
more restraint, or reserve, or something?"
She looked up at him full of pain, then continued slowly
to stroke her lips against a ruffled flower. Their scent, as she
smelled it, was so much kinder than he; it almost made her cry.
"You wheedle the soul out of things," he said. "I would
never wheedle--at any rate, I'd go straight."
He scarcely knew what he was saying. These things came from
him mechanically. She looked at him. His body seemed one weapon,
firm and hard against her.
"You're always begging things to love you," he said, "as if you
were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them---"
Rhythmically, Miriam was swaying and stroking the flower with
her mouth, inhaling the scent which ever after made her shudder
as it came to her nostrils.
"You don't want to love--your eternal and abnormal craving
is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative.
You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love,
because you've got a shortage somewhere."
She was stunned by his cruelty, and did not hear. He had not
the faintest notion of what he was saying. It was as if his fretted,
tortured soul, run hot by thwarted passion, jetted off these sayings
like sparks from electricity. She did not grasp anything he said.
She only sat crouched beneath his cruelty and his hatred of her.
She never realised in a flash. Over everything she brooded
and brooded.
After tea he stayed with Edgar and the brothers, taking no
notice of Miriam. She, extremely unhappy on this looked-for holiday,
waited for him. And at last he yielded and came to her.
She was determined to track this mood of his to its origin.
She counted it not much more than a mood.
"Shall we go through the wood a little way?" she asked him,
knowing he never refused a direct request.
They went down to the warren. On the middle path they
passed a trap, a narrow horseshoe hedge of small fir-boughs,
baited with the guts of a rabbit. Paul glanced at it frowning.