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she replied bitterly.
“Is it sweated?”
“More or less. Isn't ALL woman's work? That's another trick the men have played, since we force ourselves into the labour market.”
“Now then, you shut up about the men,” said her mother. “If the women wasn't fools, the men wouldn't be bad uns, that's what I say. No man was ever that bad wi' me but what he got it back again. Not but what they're a lousy lot, there's no denying it.”
“But they're all right really, aren't they?” he asked.
“Well, they're a bit different from women,” she answered.
“Would you care to be back at Jordan's?” he asked Clara.
“I don't think so,” she replied.
“Yes, she would!” cried her mother; “thank her stars if she could get back. Don't you listen to her. She's for ever on that 'igh horse of hers, an' it's back's that thin an' starved it'll cut her in two one of these days.”
Clara suffered badly from her mother. Paul felt as if his eyes were coming very wide open. Wasn't he to take Clara's fulminations so seriously, after all? She spun steadily at her work. He experienced a thrill of joy, thinking she might need his help. She seemed denied and deprived of so much. And her arm moved mechanically, that should never have been subdued to a mechanism, and her head was bowed to the lace, that never should have been bowed. She seemed to be stranded there among the refuse that life has thrown away, doing her jennying. It was a bitter thing to her to be put aside by life, as if it had no use for her. No wonder she protested.
She came with him to the door. He stood below in the mean street, looking up at her. So fine she was in her stature and her bearing, she reminded him of Juno dethroned. As she stood in the doorway, she winced from the street, from her surroundings.
“And you will go with Mrs. Hodgkisson to Hucknall?”
He was talking quite meaninglessly, only watching her. Her grey eyes at last met his. They looked dumb with humiliation, pleading with a kind of captive misery. He was shaken and at a loss. He had thought her high and mighty.
When he left her, he wanted to run. He went to the station in a sort of dream, and was at home without realising he had moved out of her street.
He had an idea that Susan, the overseer of the Spiral girls, was about to be married. He asked her the next day.
“I say, Susan, I heard a whisper of your getting married. What about it?”
Susan flushed red.
“Who's been talking to you?” she replied.
“Nobody. I merely heard a whisper that you WERE thinking—”
“Well, I am, though you needn't tell anybody. What's more, I wish I wasn't!”
“Nay, Susan, you won't make me believe that.”
“Shan't I? You CAN believe it, though. I'd rather stop here a thousand times.”
Paul was perturbed.
“Why, Susan?”
The girl's colour was high, and her eyes flashed.
“That's why!”
“And must you?”
For answer, she looked at him. There was about him a candour and gentleness which made the women trust him. He understood.
“Ah, I'm sorry,” he said.
Tears came to her eyes.
“But you'll see it'll turn out all right. You'll make the best of it,” he continued rather wistfully.
“There's nothing else for it.”
“Yea, there's making the worst of it. Try and make it all right.”
He soon made occasion to call again on Clara.
“Would you,” he said, “care to come back to Jordan's?”
She put down her work, laid her beautiful arms on the table, and looked at him for some moments without answering. Gradually the flush mounted her cheek.
“Why?” she asked.
Paul felt rather awkward.
“Well, because Susan is thinking of leaving,” he said.
Clara went on with her jennying. The white lace leaped in little jumps and bounds on to the card. He waited for her. Without raising her head, she said at last, in a peculiar low voice:
“Have you said anything about it?”
“Except to you, not a word.”
There was again a long silence.
“I will apply when the advertisement is out,” she said.
“You will apply before that. I will let you know exactly when.”
She went on spinning her little machine, and did not contradict him.
Clara came to Jordan's. Some of the older hands, Fanny among them, remembered her earlier rule, and cordially disliked the memory. Clara had always been “ikey”, reserved, and superior. She had never mixed with the girls as one of themselves. If she had occasion to find fault, she did it coolly and with perfect politeness, which the defaulter felt to be a bigger insult than crassness. Towards Fanny, the poor, overstrung hunchback, Clara was unfailingly compassionate and gentle, as a result of which Fanny shed more bitter tears than ever the rough tongues of the other overseers had caused her.
There was something in Clara that Paul disliked, and much that piqued him. If she were about, he always watched her strong throat or her neck, upon which the blonde hair grew low and fluffy. There was a fine down, almost invisible, upon the skin of her face and arms, and when once he had perceived it, he saw it always.
When he was at his work, painting in the afternoon, she would come and stand near to him, perfectly motionless. Then he felt her, though she neither spoke nor touched him. Although she stood a yard away he felt as if he were in contact with her. Then he could paint no more. He flung down the brushes, and turned to talk to her.
Sometimes she praised his work; sometimes she was critical and cold.
“You are affected in that piece,” she would say; and, as there was an element of truth in her condemnation, his blood boiled with anger.
Again: “What of this?” he would ask enthusiastically.
“H'm!” She made a small doubtful sound. “It doesn't interest me much.”
“Because you don't understand it,” he retorted.
“Then why ask me about it?”
“Because I thought you would understand.”
She would shrug her shoulders in scorn of his work. She maddened him. He was furious. Then he abused her, and went into passionate exposition of his stuff. This amused and stimulated her. But she never owned that she had been wrong.
During the ten years that she had belonged to the women's movement she had acquired a fair amount of education, and, having had some of Miriam's passion to be instructed, had taught herself French, and could read in that language with a struggle. She considered herself as a woman apart, and particularly apart, from her class. The girls in the Spiral department were all of good homes. It was a small, special industry, and had a certain distinction. There was an air of refinement in both rooms. But Clara was aloof also from her fellow-workers.
None of these things, however, did she reveal to Paul. She was not the one to give herself away. There was a sense of mystery about her. She was so reserved, he felt she had much to reserve. Her history was open on the surface, but its inner meaning was hidden from everybody. It was exciting. And then sometimes he caught her looking at him from under her brows with an almost furtive, sullen scrutiny, which made him move quickly. Often she met his eyes. But then