Sons and Lovers - Daimon Club

we shan't have him in much more. I'm sorry; he's good company.
And Baxter Dawes wants locking up, that's what he wants."
Paul would have died rather than his mother should get
to know of this affair. He suffered tortures of humiliation
and self-consciousness. There was now a good deal of his life
of which necessarily he could not speak to his mother. He had
a life apart from her--his sexual life. The rest she still kept.
But he felt he had to conceal something from her, and it irked him.
There was a certain silence between them, and he felt he had,
in that silence, to defend himself against her; he felt condemned
by her. Then sometimes he hated her, and pulled at her bondage.
His life wanted to free itself of her. It was like a circle where life
turned back on itself, and got no farther. She bore him, loved him,
kept him, and his love turned back into her, so that he could not
be free to go forward with his own life, really love another woman.
At this period, unknowingly, he resisted his mother's influence.
He did not tell her things; there was a distance between them.
Clara was happy, almost sure of him. She felt she had at last
got him for herself; and then again came the uncertainty. He told
her jestingly of the affair with her husband. Her colour came up,
her grey eyes flashed.
"That's him to a 'T'," she cried--"like a navvy! He's not fit
for mixing with decent folk."
"Yet you married him," he said.
It made her furious that he reminded her.
"I did!" she cried. "But how was I to know?"
"I think he might have been rather nice," he said.
"You think I made him what he is!" she exclaimed.
"Oh no! he made himself. But there's something about him---"
Clara looked at her lover closely. There was something in him
she hated, a sort of detached criticism of herself, a coldness
which made her woman's soul harden against him.
"And what are you going to do?" she asked.
"How?"