Sons and Lovers - Daimon Club

as two souls. So I feel it.
"Ought I to send this letter?--I doubt it. But there--it
is best to understand. Au revoir."
Miriam read this letter twice, after which she sealed it up.
A year later she broke the seal to show her mother the letter.
"You are a nun--you are a nun." The words went into her heart
again and again. Nothing he ever had said had gone into her
so deeply, fixedly, like a mortal wound.
She answered him two days after the party.
"'Our intimacy would have been all-beautiful but for one
little mistake,'" she quoted. "Was the mistake mine?"
Almost immediately he replied to her from Nottingham,
sending her at the same time a little "Omar Khayyam."
"I am glad you answered; you are so calm and natural you put
me to shame. What a ranter I am! We are often out of sympathy.
But in fundamentals we may always be together I think.
"I must thank you for your sympathy with my painting and drawing.
Many a sketch is dedicated to you. I do look forward to your criticisms,
which, to my shame and glory, are always grand appreciations.
It is a lovely joke, that. Au revoir."
This was the end of the first phase of Paul's love affair.
He was now about twenty-three years old, and, though still virgin,
the sex instinct that Miriam had over-refined for so long now
grew particularly strong. Often, as he talked to Clara Dawes,
came that thickening and quickening of his blood, that peculiar
concentration in the breast, as if something were alive there,
a new self or a new centre of consciousness, warning him that
sooner or later he would have to ask one woman or another. But he
belonged to Miriam. Of that she was so fixedly sure that he allowed
her right.
CHAPTER X
CLARA
WHEN he was twenty-three years old, Paul sent in a landscape to
the winter exhibition at Nottingham Castle. Miss Jordan had taken
a good deal of interest in him, and invited him to her house,
where he met other artists. He was beginning to grow ambitious.