Sons and Lovers - Daimon Club

The feeling that things were going in a circle made him mad.
Clara was, indeed, passionately in love with him, and he with her,
as far as passion went. In the daytime he forgot her a good deal.
She was working in the same building, but he was not aware of it.
He was busy, and her existence was of no matter to him. But all the
time she was in her Spiral room she had a sense that he was upstairs,
a physical sense of his person in the same building. Every second
she expected him to come through the door, and when he came it
was a shock to her. But he was often short and offhand with her.
He gave her his directions in an official manner, keeping her at bay.
With what wits she had left she listened to him. She dared not
misunderstand or fail to remember, but it was a cruelty to her.
She wanted to touch his chest. She knew exactly how his breast was
shapen under the waistcoat, and she wanted to touch it. It maddened
her to hear his mechanical voice giving orders about the work.
She wanted to break through the sham of it, smash the trivial coating
of business which covered him with hardness, get at the man again;
but she was afraid, and before she could feel one touch of his warmth he
was gone, and she ached again.
He knew that she was dreary every evening she did not see him,
so he gave her a good deal of his time. The days were often
a misery to her, but the evenings and the nights were usually
a bliss to them both. Then they were silent. For hours they
sat together, or walked together in the dark, and talked only
a few, almost meaningless words. But he had her hand in his,
and her bosom left its warmth in his chest, making him feel whole.
One evening they were walking down by the canal,
and something was troubling him. She knew she had not got him.
All the time he whistled softly and persistently to himself.
She listened, feeling she could learn more from his whistling than
from his speech. It was a sad dissatisfied tune--a tune that made
her feel he would not stay with her. She walked on in silence.
When they came to the swing bridge he sat down on the great pole,
looking at the stars in the water. He was a long way from her.
She had been thinking.
"Will you always stay at Jordan's?" she asked.
"No," he answered without reflecting. "No; I s'll leave
Nottingham and go abroad--soon."
"Go abroad! What for?"
"I dunno! I feel restless."
"But what shall you do?"
"I shall have to get some steady designing work, and some sort