want her as a man wants a woman had in him
been suppressed into a shame. When she shrank in her convulsed, coiled
torture from the thought of such a thing, he had winced to the depths of
his soul. And now this "purity" prevented even their first love-kiss.
It was as if she could scarcely stand the shock of physical love, even a
passionate kiss, and then he was too shrinking and sensitive to give it.

As they walked along the dark fen-meadow he watched the moon and did not
speak. She plodded beside him. He hated her, for she seemed in some way
to make him despise himself. Looking ahead--he saw the one light in the
darkness, the window of their lamp-lit cottage.

He loved to think of his mother, and the other jolly people.

"Well, everybody else has been in long ago!" said his mother as they
entered.

"What does that matter!" he cried irritably. "I can go a walk if I like,
can't I?"

"And I should have thought you could get in to supper with the rest,"
said Mrs. Morel.

"I shall please myself," he retorted. "It's not LATE. I shall do as I
like."

"Very well," said his mother cuttingly, "then DO as you like." And she
took no further notice of him that evening. Which he pretended neither
to notice nor to care about, but sat reading. Miriam read also,
obliterating herself. Mrs. Morel hated her for making her son like this.
She watched Paul growing irritable, priggish, and melancholic. For this
she put the blame on Miriam. Annie and all her friends joined against
the girl. Miriam had no friend of her own, only Paul. But she did not
suffer so much, because she despised the triviality of these other
people.

And Paul hated her because, somehow, she spoilt his ease and
naturalness. And he writhed himself with a feeling of humiliation.

CHAPTER VIII

STRIFE IN LOVE

ARTHUR finished his apprenticeship, and got a job on the electrical
plant at Minton Pit. He earned very little, but had a good chance of
getting on. But he was wild and restless. He did not drink nor gamble.
Yet he somehow contrived to get into endless scrapes, always through
some hot-headed thoughtlessness. Either he went rabbiting in the woods,
like a poacher, or he stayed in Nottingham all night instead of coming
home, or he miscalculated his dive into the canal at Bestwood, and
scored his chest into one mass of wounds on the raw stones and tins at
the bottom.

He had not been at his work many months when again he did not come home
one night.