Sons and Lovers - Daimon Club

"It's my birthday, and they've bought me a fine lot of paints,
all the girls. They're jealous of you"--he felt her stiffen coldly
at the word 'jealous'--"merely because I sometimes bring you a book,"
he added slowly. "But, you see, it's only a trifle. Don't bother
about it, will you--because"--he laughed quickly--"well, what would they
say if they saw us here now, in spite of their victory?"
She was angry with him for his clumsy reference to
their present intimacy. It was almost insolent of him.
Yet he was so quiet, she forgave him, although it cost her an effort.
Their two hands lay on the rough stone parapet of the Castle wall.
He had inherited from his mother a fineness of mould, so that
his hands were small and vigorous. Hers were large, to match her
large limbs, but white and powerful looking. As Paul looked at them
he knew her. "She is wanting somebody to take her hands--for all she
is so contemptuous of us," he said to himself. And she saw nothing but
his two hands, so warm and alive, which seemed to live for her. He was
brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows.
The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene;
all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy,
the same in all the houses and the river-flats and the people and
the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms
seemed to have melted away, there remained the mass from which all