Sons and Lovers - Daimon Club

"But I don't understand," she said huskily. "Yesterday---"
The night was turning jangled and hateful to him as the
twilight faded. And she bowed under her suffering.
"I know," he cried, "you never will! You'll never believe that
I can't--can't physically, any more than I can fly up like a skylark---"
"What?" she murmured. Now she dreaded.
"Love you."
He hated her bitterly at that moment because he made her suffer.
Love her! She knew he loved her. He really belonged to her.
This about not loving her, physically, bodily, was a mere perversity
on his part, because he knew she loved him. He was stupid like
a child. He belonged to her. His soul wanted her. She guessed
somebody had been influencing him. She felt upon him the hardness,
the foreignness of another influence.
"What have they been saying at home?" she asked.
"It's not that," he answered.
And then she knew it was. She despised them for their commonness,
his people. They did not know what things were really worth.
He and she talked very little more that night. After all he
left her to cycle with Edgar.
He had come back to his mother. Hers was the strongest
tie in his life. When he thought round, Miriam shrank away.
There was a vague, unreal feel about her. And nobody else mattered.
There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt
into unreality: the place where his mother was. Everybody else
could grow shadowy, almost non-existent to him, but she could not.
It was as if the pivot and pole of his life, from which he could
not escape, was his mother.
And in the same way she waited for him. In him was established
her life now. After all, the life beyond offered very little to
Mrs. Morel. She saw that our chance for DOING is here, and doing
counted with her. Paul was going to prove that she had been right;
he was going to make a man whom nothing should shift off his feet;
he was going to alter the face of the earth in some way which mattered.
Wherever he went she felt her soul went with him. Whatever he did she
felt her soul stood by him, ready, as it were, to hand him his tools.
She could not bear it when he was with Miriam. William was dead.
She would fight to keep Paul.