"You know I should. You know, whoever you went with, I should say it was too far for you to go trailing, late at night, when you've been to Nottingham. Besides"--her voice suddenly flashed into anger and contempt--"it is disgusting--bits of lads and girls courting."
"It's not! Do you think we _spoon_ and do? We only talk."
"Till goodness knows what time and distance," was the sarcastic rejoinder.
Paul snapped at the laces of his boots angrily.
"What are you so mad about?" he asked. "Because you don't like her?"
"I don't say I don't like her. But I don't hold with children keeping company, and never did."
"But you don't mind our Annie going out with Jim Inger."
He failed to see the meaning of this remark. But his mother looked tired. She was never so strong after William's death: and her eyes hurt her.
"Well," he said, "it's so pretty in the country. Mr. Sleath asked about you. He said he'd missed you. Are you a bit better?"
"I ought to have been in bed a long time ago," she replied.
"Why, mother, you know you wouldn't have gone before quarter-past ten."
"Oh, little woman, you'd say anything now you're disagreeable with me, wouldn't you?"
He kissed her forehead that he knew so well: the deep marks between the brows, the rising of the fine hair, greying now, and the proud setting of the temples. His hand lingered on her shoulder after his kiss. Then he went slowly to bed. He had forgotten Miriam; he only saw how his mother's hair was lifted back from her warm, broad brow. And somehow, she was hurt.
Then the next time he saw Miriam he said to her:
"Don't let me be late tonight--not later than ten o'clock. My mother gets so upset."
"Because she says I oughtn't to be out late when I have to get up early."
"Very well!" said Miriam, rather quietly, with just a touch of a sneer.
He resented that. And he was usually late again.
That there was any love growing between him and Miriam neither of them would have acknowledged. He thought he was too sane for such sentimentality, and she thought herself too lofty. They both were late in coming to maturity, and psychical ripeness was much behind even the physical. Miriam was exceedingly sensitive, as her mother had always been. The slightest grossness made her recoil almost in anguish. Her brothers were brutal, but never coarse in speech. The men did all the discussing of farm matters outside. But, perhaps because of the continual business of birth and of begetting which goes on upon every farm, Miriam was the more hypersensitive to the matter, and her blood was chastened almost to disgust of the faintest suggestion of such intercourse. Paul took his pitch from her, and their intimacy went on in an utterly blanched and chaste fashion. It could never be mentioned that the mare was in foal.