Page:Women in Love, Lawrence, 1920.djvu/30

22 Suddenly Mrs. Crich came noiselessly into the room, peering about with her strong, clear face. She was still wearing her hat, and her sac coat of blue silk.

"What is it, mother?" said Gerald.

"Nothing, nothing!" she answered vaguely. And she went straight towards Birkin, who was talking to a Crich brother-in-law.

"How do you do, Mr. Birkin," she said, in her low voice, that seemed to take no count of her guests. She held out her hand to him.

"Oh, Mrs. Crich," replied Birkin, in his readily-changing voice, "I couldn't come to you before."

"I don't know half the people here," she said, in her low voice. Her son-in-law moved uneasily away.

"And you don't like strangers?" laughed Birkin. "I myself can never see why one should take account of people, just because they happen to be in the room with one: why should I know they are there?"

"Why indeed, why indeed!" said Mrs. Crich, in her low, tense voice. "Except that they are there. — I don't know people whom I find in the house. The children introduce them to me — 'Mother, this is Mr. So-and-so.' I am no further. What has Mr. So-and-so to do with his own name? — and what have I to do with either him or his name?"

She looked up at Birkin. She startled him. He was flattered too that she came to talk to him, for she took hardly any notice of anybody. He looked down at her tense clear face, with its heavy features, but he was afraid to look into her heavy-seeing blue eyes. He noticed instead how her hair looped in slack, slovenly strands over her rather beautiful ears, which were not quite clean. Neither was her neck perfectly clean. Even in that he seemed to belong to her, rather than to the rest of the company; though, he thought to himself, he was always well-washed, at any rate at the neck and ears.

He smiled faintly, thinking these things. Yet he was tense, feeling that he and the elderly, estranged woman were conferring together like traitors, like enemies within the camp of the other people. He resembled a deer, that throws one