Page:Sons and Lovers, 1913, Lawrence.djvu/122

110 than ever. Even then, however, he was not offensive, but one of those people who hurt themselves by their own irritability more than they hurt other people.

“Haven’t you done that yet?” he would cry. “Go on, be a month of Sundays.”

Again, and Paul could understand him least then, he was jocular and in high spirits.

“I’m going to bring my little Yorkshire terrier bitch tomorrow,” he said jubilantly to Paul.

“What’s a Yorkshire terrier?”

“Don’t know what a Yorkshire terrier is? Don’t know a Yorkshire——” Mr. Pappleworth was aghast.

“Is it a little silky one—colours of iron and rusty silver?”

“That’s it, my lad. She’s a gem. She’s had five pounds’ worth of pups already, and she’s worth over seven pounds herself; and she doesn’t weigh twenty ounces.”

The next day the bitch came. She was a shivering, miserable morsel. Paul did not care for her; she seemed so like a wet rag that would never dry. Then a man called for her, and began to make coarse jokes. But Mr. Pappleworth nodded his head in the direction of the boy, and the talk went on sotto voce.

Mr. Jordan only made one more excursion to watch Paul, and then the only fault he found was seeing the boy lay his pen on the counter.

“Put your pen in your ear, if you’re going to be a clerk. Pen in your ear!” And one day he said to the lad, “Why don’t you hold your shoulders straighter? Come down here,” when he took him into the glass office and fitted him with special braces for keeping the shoulders square.

But Paul liked the girls best. The men seemed common and rather dull. He liked them all, but they were uninteresting. Polly, the little brisk overseer downstairs, finding Paul eating in the cellar, asked him if she could cook him anything on her little stove. Next day his mother gave him a dish that could be heated up. He took it into the pleasant, clean room to Polly. And very soon it grew to be an established custom that he should have dinner with her. When he came in at eight in the morning he took his basket to her, and when he came down at one o’clock she had his dinner ready.

He was not very tall, and pale, with thick chestnut hair, irregular features, and a wide, full mouth. She was like a small bird. He often called her a “robinet.” Though naturally rather quiet, he would sit and chatter with her for