presented to them. Miriam was often
sufficiently lofty to turn it. Then they spat on her and hated her. But
she walked in her proud humility, living within herself.

There was always this feeling of jangle and discord in the Leivers
family. Although the boys resented so bitterly this eternal appeal to
their deeper feelings of resignation and proud humility, yet it had
its effect on them. They could not establish between themselves and an
outsider just the ordinary human feeling and unexaggerated friendship;
they were always restless for the something deeper. Ordinary folk
seemed shallow to them, trivial and inconsiderable. And so they were
unaccustomed, painfully uncouth in the simplest social intercourse,
suffering, and yet insolent in their superiority. Then beneath was the
yearning for the soul-intimacy to which they could not attain because
they were too dumb, and every approach to close connection was blocked
by their clumsy contempt of other people. They wanted genuine intimacy,
but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they
scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms
common human intercourse.

Paul fell under Mrs. Leivers's spell. Everything had a religious
and intensified meaning when he was with her. His soul, hurt, highly
developed, sought her as if for nourishment. Together they seemed to
sift the vital fact from an experience.

Miriam was her mother's daughter. In the sunshine of the afternoon
mother and daughter went down the fields with him. They looked for
nests. There was a jenny wren's in the hedge by the orchard.

"I DO want you to see this," said Mrs. Leivers.

He crouched down and carefully put his finger through the thorns into
the round door of the nest.

"It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird,"
he said, "it's so warm. They say a bird makes its nest round like a cup
with pressing its breast on it. Then how did it make the ceiling round,
I wonder?"

The nest seemed to start into life for the two women. After that, Miriam
came to see it every day. It seemed so close to her. Again, going
down the hedgeside with the girl, he noticed the celandines, scalloped
splashes of gold, on the side of the ditch.

"I like them," he said, "when their petals go flat back with the
sunshine. They seemed to be pressing themselves at the sun."

And then the celandines ever after drew her with a little spell.
Anthropomorphic as she