“Well,” his mother laughed, “she can scarcely help it.”
“And why wasn’t I the oldest son? Look—they say the young ones have the advantage—but look, they had the young mother. You should have had me for your eldest son.”
“I didn’t arrange it,” she remonstrated. “Come to consider, you’re as much to blame as me.”
He turned on her, white, his eyes furious.
“What are you old for!” he said, mad with his impotence. “Why can’t you walk? Why can’t you come with me to places?”
“At one time,” she replied, “I could have run up that hill a good deal better than you.”
“What’s the good of that to me?” he cried, hitting his fist on the wall. Then he became plaintive. “It’s too bad of you to be ill, Little, it is——”
“Ill!” she cried. “I’m a bit old, and you’ll have to put up with it, that’s all.”
They were quiet. But it was as much as they could bear. They got jolly again over tea. As they sat by Brayford, watching the boats, he told her about Clara. His mother asked him innumerable questions.
“Then who does she live with?”
“With her mother, on Bluebell Hill.”
“And have they enough to keep them?”
“I don’t think so. I think they do lace work.”
“And wherein lies her charm, my boy?”
“I don’t know that she’s charming, mother. But she’s nice. And she seems straight, you know—not a bit deep, not a bit.”
“But she’s a good deal older than you.”
“She’s thirty, I’m going of twenty-three.”
“You haven’t told me what you like her for.”
“Because I don’t know—a sort of defiant way she’s got—a sort of angry way.”
Mrs. Morel considered. She would have been glad now for her son to fall in love with some woman who would—she did not know what. But he fretted so, got so furious suddenly, and again was melancholic. She wished he knew some nice woman—— She did not know what she wished, but left it vague. At any rate she was not hostile to the idea of Clara.
Annie, too, was getting married. Leonard had gone away to work in Birmingham. One week-end when he was home she had said to him:
“You don’t look very well, my lad.”
