garden. But they loved the house that lay
so solitary, with a sea-meadow on one side, and immense expanse of land
patched in white barley, yellow oats, red wheat, and green root-crops,
flat and stretching level to the sky.

Paul kept accounts. He and his mother ran the show. The total
expenses--lodging, food, everything--was sixteen shillings a week per
person. He and Leonard went bathing in the mornings. Morel was wandering
abroad quite early.

"You, Paul," his mother called from the bedroom, "eat a piece of
bread-and-butter."

"All right," he answered.

And when he got back he saw his mother presiding in state at the
breakfast-table. The woman of the house was young. Her husband was
blind, and she did laundry work. So Mrs. Morel always washed the pots in
the kitchen and made the beds.

"But you said you'd have a real holiday," said Paul, "and now you work."

"Work!" she exclaimed. "What are you talking about!"

He loved to go with her across the fields to the village and the sea.
She was afraid of the plank bridge, and he abused her for being a baby.
On the whole he stuck to her as if he were HER man.

Miriam did not get much of him, except, perhaps, when all the others
went to the "Coons". Coons were insufferably stupid to Miriam, so he
thought they were to himself also, and he preached priggishly to Annie
about the fatuity of listening to them. Yet he, too, knew all their
songs, and sang them along the roads roisterously. And if he found
himself listening, the stupidity pleased him very much. Yet to Annie he
said:

"Such rot! there isn't a grain of intelligence in it. Nobody with more
gumption than a grasshopper could go and sit and listen." And to Miriam
he said, with much scorn of Annie and the others: "I suppose they're at
the 'Coons'."

It was queer to see Miriam singing coon songs. She had a straight chin
that went in a perpendicular line from the lower lip to the turn. She
always reminded Paul of some sad Botticelli angel when she sang, even
when it was:

"Come down lover's lane
For a walk with me, talk with me."

Only when he sketched, or at evening when the others were at the
"Coons", she had him to herself. He talked to her endlessly about his
love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in
Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed
Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged
leaping forward of the persisten