Sons and Lovers by David Herbert Lawrence

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Context:

PART I
     1.   The Early Married Life of the Morels
     2.   The Birth of Paul, and Another Battle
     3.   The Casting Off of Morel--The Taking on of William
     4.   The Young Life of Paul
     5.   Paul Launches into Life
     6.   Death in the Family

     PART II

     7.   Lad-and-Girl Love
     8.   Strife in Love
     9.   Defeat of Miriam
     10.  Clara
     11.  The Test on Miriam
     12.  Passion
     13.  Baxter Dawes
     14.  The Release
     15.  Derelict

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

THE EARLY MARRIED LIFE OF THE MORELS

"THE BOTTOMS" succeeded to "Hell Row". Hell Row was a block of thatched,
bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There
lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away.
The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small
mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded
wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these
same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the
few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth,
making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and
the meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs
here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers,
straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took place, gin-pits were
elbowed aside by the large mines of the financiers. The coal and iron
field of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire was discovered. Carston, Waite
and Co. appeared. Amid tremendous excitement, Lord Palmerston formally
opened the company's first mine at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood
Forest.

About this time the notorious Hell Row, which through growing old had
acquired an evil reputation, was burned down, and much dirt was cleansed
away.

Carston, Waite & Co. found they had struck on a good thing, so, down the
valleys of the brooks from Selby and Nuttall, new mines were sunk, until
soon there were six pits working. From Nuttall, high up on the sandstone
among the woods, the railway ran, past the ruined priory of the
Carthusians and past Robin Hood's Well, down to Spinney Park, then on to
Minton, a large mine among corn-fields; from Minton across the farmlands
of the valleyside to Bunker's Hill, branching off there, and running
north to Beggarlee and Selby, that looks over at Crich and the hills of
Derbyshire: six mines like black studs on the countryside, linked by a
loop of fine chain, the railway.

To accommodate the regiments of miners, Carston, Waite and Co. built the
Squares, great quadrangles of dwellings on the hillside of Bestwood,
and then, in the brook valley, on the site of Hell Row, they erected the
Bottoms.

The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners' dwellings, two rows
of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino, and twelve houses in a
block. This double row of dwellings sat at the foot of the rather sharp
<DW72> from Bestwood, and looked out, from the attic windows at least, on
the slow climb of the valley towards Selby.

The houses themselves were substantial and very decent. One could walk
all round, seeing little front gardens with auriculas and saxifrage in
the shadow of the bottom block, sweet-williams and pinks in the sunny
top block; seeing neat front windows, little porches, little privet
hedges, and dormer windows for the attics. But that was outside; that
was the view on to the uninhabited parlours of all the colliers' wives.
The dwelling-room, the kitchen, was at the back of the house, facing
inward between the blocks, looking at a scrubby back garden, and then at
the ash-pits. And between the rows, between the long lines of ash-pits,
went the alley, where the children played and the women gossiped and the
men smoked. So, the actual conditions of living in the Bottoms, that
was so well built and that looked so nice, were quite unsavoury because
people must live in the kitchen, and the kitchens opened on to that
nasty alley of ash-pits.

Mrs. Morel was not anxious to move into the Bottoms, which was already
twelve years old and on the downward path, when she descended to it from
Bestwood. But it was the best she could do. Moreover, she had an end
house in one of the top blocks, and thus had only one neighbour; on
the other side an extra strip of garden. And, having an end house, she
enjoyed a kind of aristocracy among the other women of the "between"
houses, because her rent was five shillings and sixpence instead of
five shillings a week. But this superiority in station was not much
consolation to Mrs. Morel.

She was thirty-one years old, and had been married eight years. A rather
small woman, of delicate mould but resolute bearing, she shrank a little
from the first contact with the Bottoms women. She came down in the
July, and in the September expected her third baby.

Her husband was a miner. They had only been in their new home three
weeks when the wakes, or fair, began. Morel, she knew, was sure to make
a holiday of it. He went off early on the Monday morning, the day of
the fair. The two children were highly excited. William, a boy of seven,
fled off immediately after breakfast, to prowl round the wakes ground,
leaving Annie, who was only five, to whine all morning to go also. Mrs.
Morel did her work. She scarcely knew her neighbours yet, and knew no
one with whom to trust the little girl. So she promised to take her to
the wakes after dinner.

William appeared at half-past twelve. He was a very active lad,
fair-haired, freckled, with a touch of the Dane or Norwegian about him.

"Can I have my dinner, mother?" he cried, rushing in with his cap on.
"'Cause it begins at half-past one, the man says so."

"You can have your dinner as soon as it's done," replied the mother.

"Isn't it done?" he cried, his blue eyes staring at her in indignation.
"Then I'm goin' be-out it."

"You'll do nothing of the sort. It will be done in five minutes. It is
only half-past twelve."

"They'll be beginnin'," the boy half cried, half shouted.

"You won't die if they do," said the mother. "Besides, it's only
half-past twelve, so you've a full hour."

The lad began hastily to lay the table, and directly the three sat down.
They were eating batter-pudding and jam, when the boy jumped off his
chair and stood perfectly stiff. Some distance away could be heard the
first small braying of a merry-go-round, and the tooting of a horn. His
face quivered as he looked at his mother.

"I told you!" he said, running to the dresser for his cap.

"Take your pudding in your hand--and it's only five past one, so you
were wrong--you haven't got your twopence," cried the mother in a
breath.

The boy came back, bitterly disappointed, for his twopence, then went
off without a word.

"I want to go, I want to go," said Annie, beginning to cry.

"Well, and you shall go, whining, wizzening little stick!" said the
mother. And later in the afternoon she trudged up the hill under the
tall hedge with her child. The hay was gathered from the fields, and
cattle were turned on to the eddish. It was warm, peaceful.

Mrs. Morel did not like the wakes. There were two sets of horses, one
going by steam, one pulled round by a pony; three organs were grinding,
and there came odd cracks of pistol-shots, fearful screeching of the
cocoanut man's rattle, shouts of the Aunt Sally man, screeches from the
peep-show lady. The mother perceived her son gazing enraptured outside
the Lion Wallace booth, at the pictures of this famous lion that had
killed a <DW64> and maimed for life two white men. She left him alone,
and went to get Annie a spin of toffee. Presently the lad stood in front
of her, wildly excited.

"You never said you was coming--isn't the' a lot of things?--that lion's
killed three men--I've spent my tuppence--an' look here."

He pulled from his pocket two egg-cups, with pink moss-roses on them.

"I got these from that stall where y'ave ter get them marbles in
them holes. An' I got these two in two goes-'aepenny a go-they've got
moss-roses on, look here. I wanted these."

She knew he wanted them for her.

"H'm!" she said, pleased. "They ARE pretty!"

"Shall you carry 'em, 'cause I'm frightened o' breakin' 'em?"

He was tipful of excitement now she had come, led her about the ground,
showed her everything. Then, at the peep-show, she explained the
pictures, in a sort of story, to which he listened as if spellbound. He
would not leave her. All the time he stuck close to her, bristling with
a small boy's pride of her. For no other woman looked such a lady as she
did, in her little black bonnet and her cloak. She smiled when she saw
women she knew. When she was tired she said to her son:

"Well, are you coming now, or later?"

"Are you goin' a'ready?" he cried, his face full of reproach.

"Already? It is past four, I know."

"What are you goin' a'ready for?" he lamented.

"You needn't come if you don't want," she said.

And she went slowly away with her little girl, whilst her son stood
watching her, cut to the heart to let her go, and yet unable to leave
the wakes. As she crossed the open ground in front of the Moon and Stars
she heard men shouting, and smelled the beer, and hurried a little,
thinking her husband was probably in the bar.

At about half-past six her son came home, tired now, rather pale, and
somewhat wretched. He was miserable, though he did not know it, because
he had let her go alone. Since she had gone, he had not enjoyed his
wakes.

"Has my dad been?" he asked.

"No," said the mother.

"He's helping to wait at the Moon and Stars. I seed him through that
black tin stuff wi' holes in, on the window, wi' his sleeves rolled up."

"Ha!" exclaimed the mother shortly. "He's got no money. An' he'll be
satisfied if he gets his 'lowance, whether they give him more or not."

When the light was fading, and Mrs. Morel could see no more to sew, she
rose and went to the door. Everywhere was the sound of excitement, the
restlessness of the holiday, that at last infected her. She went
out into the side garden. Women were coming home from the wakes, the
children hugging a white lamb with green legs, or a wooden horse.
Occasionally a man lurched past, almost as full as he could carry.
Sometimes a good husband came along with his family, peacefully. But
usually the women and children were alone. The stay-at-home mothers
stood gossiping at the corners of the alley, as the twilight sank,
folding their arms under their white aprons.

Mrs. Morel was alone, but she was used to it. Her son and her little
girl slept upstairs; so, it seemed, her home was there behind her,
fixed and stable. But she felt wretched with the coming child. The world
seemed a dreary place, where nothing else would happen for her--at
least until William grew up. But for herself, nothing but this dreary
endurance--till the children grew up. And the children! She could not
afford to have this third. She did not want it. The father was serving
beer in a public house, swilling himself drunk. She despised him, and
was tied to him. This coming child was too much for her. If it were not
for William and Annie, she was sick of it, the struggle with poverty and
ugliness and meanness.

She went into the front garden, feeling too heavy to take herself out,
yet unable to stay indoors. The heat suffocated her. And looking ahead,
the prospect of her life made her feel as if she were buried alive.

The front garden was a small square with a privet hedge. There she
stood, trying to soothe herself with the scent of flowers and the
fading, beautiful evening. Opposite her small gate was the stile that
led uphill, under the tall hedge between the burning glow of the cut
pastures. The sky overhead throbbed and pulsed with light. The glow sank
quickly off the field; the earth and the hedges smoked dusk. As it grew
dark, a ruddy glare came out on the hilltop, and out of the glare the
diminished commotion of the fair.

Sometimes, down the trough of darkness formed by the path under the
hedges, men came lurching home. One young man lapsed into a run down
the steep bit that ended the hill, and went with a crash into the stile.
Mrs. Morel shuddered. He picked himself up, swearing viciously, rather
pathetically, as if he thought the stile had wanted to hurt him.

She went indoors, wondering if things were never going to alter. She was
beginning by now to realise that they would not. She seemed so far
away from her girlhood, she wondered if it were the same person walking
heavily up the back garden at the Bottoms as had run so lightly up the
breakwater at Sheerness ten years before.

"What have I to do with it?" she said to herself. "What have I to do
with all this? Even the child I am going to have! It doesn't seem as if
I were taken into account."

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes
one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were
slurred over.

"I wait," Mrs. Morel said to herself--"I wait, and what I wait for can
never come."

Then she straightened the kitchen, lit the lamp, mended the fire, looked
out the washing for the next day, and put it to soak. After which
she sat down to her sewing. Through the long hours her needle flashed
regularly through the stuff. Occasionally she sighed, moving to relieve
herself. And all the time she was thinking how to make the most of what
she had, for the children's sakes.

At half-past eleven her husband came. His cheeks were very red and
very shiny above his black moustache. His head nodded slightly. He was
pleased with himself.

"Oh! Oh! waitin' for me, lass? I've bin 'elpin' Anthony, an' what's
think he's gen me? Nowt b'r a lousy hae'f-crown, an' that's ivry
penny--"

"He thinks you've made the rest up in beer," she said shortly.

"An' I 'aven't--that I 'aven't. You b'lieve me, I've 'ad very little
this day, I have an' all." His voice went tender. "Here, an' I browt
thee a bit o' brandysnap, an' a cocoanut for th' children." He laid the
gingerbread and the cocoanut, a hairy object, on the table. "Nay, tha
niver said thankyer for nowt i' thy life, did ter?"

As a compromise, she picked up the cocoanut and shook it, to see if it
had any milk.

"It's a good 'un, you may back yer life o' that. I got it fra' Bill
Hodgkisson. 'Bill,' I says, 'tha non wants them three nuts, does ter?
Arena ter for gi'ein' me one for my bit of a lad an' wench?' 'I ham,
Walter, my lad,' 'e says; 'ta'e which on 'em ter's a mind.' An' so I
took one, an' thanked 'im. I didn't like ter shake it afore 'is eyes,
but 'e says, 'Tha'd better ma'e sure it's a good un, Walt.' An' so, yer
see, I knowed it was. He's a nice chap, is Bill Hodgkisson, e's a nice
chap!"

"A man will part with anything so long as he's drunk, and you're drunk
along with him," said Mrs. Morel.

"Eh, tha mucky little 'ussy, who's drunk, I sh'd like ter know?" said
Morel. He was extraordinarily pleased with himself, because of his day's
helping to wait in the Moon and Stars. He chattered on.

Mrs. Morel, very tired, and sick of his babble, went to bed as quickly
as possible, while he raked the fire.

Mrs. Morel came of a good old burgher family, famous independents
who had fought with Colonel Hutchinson, and who remained stout
Congregationalists. Her grandfather had gone bankrupt in the lace-market
at a time when so many lace-manufacturers were ruined in Nottingham. Her
father, George Coppard, was an engineer--a large, handsome, haughty
man, proud of his fair skin and blue eyes, but more proud still of his
integrity. Gertrude resembled her mother in her small build. But her
temper, proud and unyielding, she had from the Coppards.

George Coppard was bitterly galled by his own poverty. He became foreman
of the engineers in the dockyard at Sheerness. Mrs. Morel--Gertrude--was
the second daughter. She favoured her mother, loved her mother best of
all; but she had the Coppards' clear, defiant blue eyes and their broad
brow. She remembered to have hated her father's overbearing manner
towards her gentle, humorous, kindly-souled mother. She remembered
running over the breakwater at Sheerness and finding the boat. She
remembered to have been petted and flattered by all the men when she had
gone to the dockyard, for she was a delicate, rather proud child. She
remembered the funny old mistress, whose assistant she had become, whom
she had loved to help in the private school. And she still had the Bible
that John Field had given her. She used to walk home from chapel
with John Field when she was nineteen. He was the son of a well-to-do
tradesman, had been to college in London, and was to devote himself to
business.

She could always recall in detail a September Sunday afternoon, when
they had sat under the vine at the back of her father's house. The sun
came through the chinks of the vine-leaves and made beautiful patterns,
like a lace scarf, falling on her and on him. Some of the leaves were
clean yellow, like yellow flat flowers.

"Now sit still," he had cried. "Now your hair, I don't know what it IS
like! It's as bright as copper and gold, as red as burnt copper, and
it has gold threads where the sun shines on it. Fancy their saying it's
brown. Your mother calls it mouse-colour."

She had met his brilliant eyes, but her clear face scarcely showed the
elation which rose within her.

"But you say you don't like business," she pursued.

"I don't. I hate it!" he cried hotly.

"And you would like to go into the ministry," she half implored.

"I should. I should love it, if I thought I could make a first-rate
preacher."

"Then why don't you--why DON'T you?" Her voice rang with defiance. "If I
were a man, nothing would stop me."

She held her head erect. He was rather timid before her.

"But my father's so stiff-necked. He means to put me into the business,
and I know he'll do it."

"But if you're a MAN?" she had cried.

"Being a man isn't everything," he replied, frowning with puzzled
helplessness.

Now, as she moved about her work at the Bottoms, with some experience of
what being a man meant, she knew that it was NOT everything.

At twenty, owing to her health, she had left Sheerness. Her father had
retired home to Nottingham. John Field's father had been ruined; the
son had gone as a teacher in Norwood. She did not hear of him until, two
years later, she made determined inquiry. He had married his landlady, a
woman of forty, a widow with property.

And still Mrs. Morel preserved John Field's Bible. She did not now
believe him to be--Well, she understood pretty well what he might or
might not have been. So she preserved his Bible, and kept his memory
intact in her heart, for her own sake. To her dying day, for thirty-five
years, she did not speak of him.

When she was twenty-three years old, she met, at a Christmas party, a
young man from the Erewash Valley. Morel was then twenty-seven years
old. He was well set-up, erect, and very smart. He had wavy black hair
that shone again, and a vigorous black beard that had never been shaved.
His cheeks were ruddy, and his red, moist mouth was noticeable because
he laughed so often and so heartily. He had that rare thing, a rich,
ringing laugh. Gertrude Coppard had watched him, fascinated. He was
so full of colour and animation, his voice ran so easily into comic
grotesque, he was so ready and so pleasant with everybody. Her own
father had a rich fund of humour, but it was satiric. This man's was
different: soft, non-intellectual, warm, a kind of gambolling.

She herself was opposite. She had a curious, receptive mind which found
much pleasure and amusement in listening to other folk. She was clever
in leading folk to talk. She loved ideas, and was considered very
intellectual. What she liked most of all was an argument on religion or
philosophy or politics with some educated man. This she did not often
enjoy. So she always had people tell her about themselves, finding her
pleasure so.

In her person she was rather small and delicate, with a large brow, and
dropping bunches of brown silk curls. Her blue eyes were very straight,
honest, and searching. She had the beautiful hands of the Coppards.
Her dress was always subdued. She wore dark blue silk, with a peculiar
silver chain of silver scallops. This, and a heavy brooch of twisted
gold, was her only ornament. She was still perfectly intact, deeply
religious, and full of beautiful candour.

Walter Morel seemed melted away before her. She was to the miner that
thing of mystery and fascination, a lady. When she spoke to him, it was
with a southern pronunciation and a purity of English which thrilled
him to hear. She watched him. He danced well, as if it were natural and
joyous in him to dance. His grandfather was a French refugee who had
married an English barmaid--if it had been a marriage. Gertrude Coppard
watched the young miner as he danced, a certain subtle exultation like
glamour in his movement, and his face the flower of his body, ruddy,
with tumbled black hair, and laughing alike whatever partner he bowed
above. She thought him rather wonderful, never having met anyone like
him. Her father was to her the type of all men. And George Coppard,
proud in his bearing, handsome, and rather bitter; who preferred
theology in reading, and who drew near in sympathy only to one man, the
Apostle Paul; who was harsh in government, and in familiarity ironic;
who ignored all sensuous pleasure:--he was very different from the
miner. Gertrude herself was rather contemptuous of dancing; she had not
the slightest inclination towards that accomplishment, and had never
learned even a Roger de Coverley. She was puritan, like her father,
high-minded, and really stern. Therefore the dusky, golden softness of
this man's sensuous flame of life, that flowed off his flesh like the
flame from a candle, not baffled and gripped into incandescence by
thought and spirit as her life was, seemed to her something wonderful,
beyond her.

He came and bowed above her. A warmth radiated through her as if she had
drunk wine.

"Now do come and have this one wi' me," he said caressively. "It's easy,
you know. I'm pining to see you dance."

She had told him before she could not dance. She glanced at his humility
and smiled. Her smile was very beautiful. It moved the man so that he
forgot everything.

"No, I won't dance," she said softly. Her words came clean and ringing.

Not knowing what he was doing--he often did the right thing by
instinct--he sat beside her, inclining reverentially.

"But you mustn't miss your dance," she reproved.

"Nay, I don't want to dance that--it's not one as I care about."

"Yet you invited me to it."

He laughed very heartily at this.

"I never thought o' that. Tha'rt not long in taking the curl out of me."

It was her turn to laugh quickly.

"You don't look as if you'd come much uncurled," she said.

"I'm like a pig's tail, I curl because I canna help it," he laughed,
rather boisterously.

"And you are a miner!" she exclaimed in surprise.

"Yes. I went down when I was ten."

She looked at him in wondering dismay.

"When you were ten! And wasn't it very hard?" she asked.

"You soon get used to it. You live like th' mice, an' you pop out at
night to see what's going on."

"It makes me feel blind," she frowned.

"Like a moudiwarp!" he laughed. "Yi, an' there's some chaps as does
go round like moudiwarps." He thrust his face forward in the blind,
snout-like way of a mole, seeming to sniff and peer for direction. "They
dun though!" he protested naively. "Tha niver seed such a way they get
in. But tha mun let me ta'e thee down some time, an' tha can see for
thysen."

She looked at him, startled. This was a new tract of life suddenly
opened before her. She realised the life of the miners, hundreds of them
toiling below earth and coming up at evening. He seemed to her noble. He
risked his life daily, and with gaiety. She looked at him, with a touch
of appeal in her pure humility.

"Shouldn't ter like it?" he asked tenderly. "'Appen not, it 'ud dirty
thee."

She had never been "thee'd" and "thou'd" before.

The next Christmas they were married, and for three months she was
perfectly happy: for six months she was very happy.

He had signed the pledge, and wore the blue ribbon of a tee-totaller: he
was nothing if not showy. They lived, she thought, in his own house.
It was small, but convenient enough, and quite nicely furnished,
with solid, worthy stuff that suited her honest soul. The women, her
neighbours, were rather foreign to her, and Morel's mother and sisters
were apt to sneer at her ladylike ways. But she could perfectly well
live by herself, so long as she had her husband close.

Sometimes, when she herself wearied of love-talk, she tried to open her
heart seriously to him. She saw him listen deferentially, but without
understanding. This killed her efforts at a finer intimacy, and she had
flashes of fear. Sometimes he was restless of an evening: it was not
enough for him just to be near her, she realised. She was glad when he
set himself to little jobs.

He was a remarkably handy man--could make or mend anything. So she would
say:

"I do like that coal-rake of your mother's--it is small and natty."

"Does ter, my wench? Well, I made that, so I can make thee one!"

"What! why, it's a steel one!"

"An' what if it is! Tha s'lt ha'e one very similar, if not exactly
same."

She did not mind the mess, nor the hammering and noise. He was busy and
happy.

But in the seventh month, when she was brushing his Sunday coat, she
felt papers in the breast pocket, and, seized with a sudden curiosity,
took them out to read. He very rarely wore the frock-coat he was married
in: and it had not occurred to her before to feel curious concerning the
papers. They were the bills of the household furniture, still unpaid.

"Look here," she said at night, after he was washed and had had his
dinner. "I found these in the pocket of your wedding-coat. Haven't you
settled the bills yet?"

"No. I haven't had a chance."

"But you told me all was paid. I had better go into Nottingham on
Saturday and settle them. I don't like sitting on another man's chairs
and eating from an unpaid table."

He did not answer.

"I can have your bank-book, can't I?"

"Tha can ha'e it, for what good it'll be to thee."

"I thought--" she began. He had told her he had a good bit of money left
over. But she realised it was no use asking questions. She sat rigid
with bitterness and indignation.

The next day she went down to see his mother.

"Didn't you buy the furniture for Walter?" she asked.

"Yes, I did," tartly retorted the elder woman.

"And how much did he give you to pay for it?"

The elder woman was stung with fine indignation.

"Eighty pound, if you're so keen on knowin'," she replied.

"Eighty pounds! But there are forty-two pounds still owing!"

"I can't help that."

"But where has it all gone?"

"You'll find all the papers, I think, if you look--beside ten pound as
he owed me, an' six pound as the wedding cost down here."

"Six pounds!" echoed Gertrude Morel. It seemed to her monstrous that,
after her own father had paid so heavily for her wedding, six pounds
more should have been squandered in eating and drinking at Walter's
parents' house, at his expense.

"And how much has he sunk in his houses?" she asked.

"His houses--which houses?"

Gertrude Morel went white to the lips. He had told her the house he
lived in, and the next one, was his own.

"I thought the house we live in--" she began.

"They're my houses, those two," said the mother-in-law. "And not clear
either. It's as much as I can do to keep the mortgage interest paid."

Gertrude sat white and silent. She was her father now.

"Then we ought to be paying you rent," she said coldly.

"Walter is paying me rent," replied the mother.

"And what rent?" asked Gertrude.

"Six and six a week," retorted the mother.

It was more than the house was worth. Gertrude held her head erect,
looked straight before her.

"It is lucky to be you," said the elder woman, bitingly, "to have a
husband as takes all the worry of the money, and leaves you a free
hand."

The young wife was silent.

She said very little to her husband, but her manner had changed towards
him. Something in her proud, honourable soul had crystallised out hard
as rock.

When October came in, she thought only of Christmas. Two years ago, at
Christmas, she had met him. Last Christmas she had married him. This
Christmas she would bear him a child.

"You don't dance yourself, do you, missis?" asked her nearest neighbour,
in October, when there was great talk of opening a dancing-class over
the Brick and Tile Inn at Bestwood.

"No--I never had the least inclination to," Mrs. Morel replied.

"Fancy! An' how funny as you should ha' married your Mester. You know
he's quite a famous one for dancing."

"I didn't know he was famous," laughed Mrs. Morel.

"Yea, he is though! Why, he ran that dancing-class in the Miners' Arms
club-room for over five year."

"Did he?"

"Yes, he did." The other woman was defiant. "An' it was thronged
every Tuesday, and Thursday, an' Sat'day--an' there WAS carryin's-on,
accordin' to all accounts."

This kind of thing was gall and bitterness to Mrs. Morel, and she had
a fair share of it. The women did not spare her, at first; for she was
superior, though she could not help it.

He began to be rather late in coming home.

"They're working very late now, aren't they?" she said to her
washer-woman.

"No later than they allers do, I don't think. But they stop to have
their pint at Ellen's, an' they get talkin', an' there you are! Dinner
stone cold--an' it serves 'em right."

"But Mr. Morel does not take any drink."

The woman dropped the clothes, looked at Mrs. Morel, then went on with
her work, saying nothing.

Gertrude Morel was very ill when the boy was born. Morel was good to
her, as good as gold. But she felt very lonely, miles away from her own
people. She felt lonely with him now, and his presence only made it more
intense.

The boy was small and frail at first, but he came on quickly. He was
a beautiful child, with dark gold ringlets, and dark-blue eyes which
changed gradually to a clear grey. His mother loved him passionately.
He came just when her own bitterness of disillusion was hardest to bear;
when her faith in life was shaken, and her soul felt dreary and lonely.
She made much of the child, and the father was jealous.

At last Mrs. Morel despised her husband. She turned to the child; she
turned from the father. He had begun to neglect her; the novelty of his
own home was gone. He had no grit, she said bitterly to herself. What
he felt just at the minute, that was all to him. He could not abide by
anything. There was nothing at the back of all his show.

There began a battle between the husband and wife--a fearful, bloody
battle that ended only with the death of one. She fought to make him
undertake his own responsibilities, to make him fulfill his obligations.
But he was too different from her. His nature was purely sensuous, and
she strove to make him moral, religious. She tried to force him to face
things. He could not endure it--it drove him out of his mind.

While the baby was still tiny, the father's temper had become so
irritable that it was not to be trusted. The child had only to give a
little trouble when the man began to bully. A little more, and the hard
hands of the collier hit the baby. Then Mrs. Morel loathed her husband,
loathed him for days; and he went out and drank; and she cared very
little what he did. Only, on his return, she scathed him with her
satire.

The estrangement between them caused him, knowingly or unknowingly,
grossly to offend her where he would not have done.

William was only one year old, and his mother was proud of him, he was
so pretty. She was not well off now, but her sisters kept the boy in
clothes. Then, with his little white hat curled with an ostrich feather,
and his white coat, he was a joy to her, the twining wisps of hair
clustering round his head. Mrs. Morel lay listening, one Sunday morning,
to the chatter of the father and child downstairs. Then she dozed off.
When she came downstairs, a great fire glowed in the grate, the room was
hot, the breakfast was roughly laid, and seated in his armchair, against
the chimney-piece, sat Morel, rather timid; and standing between
his legs, the child--cropped like a sheep, with such an odd round
poll--looking wondering at

Question: Summarize the above passage in exactly 500 words and give a brief outlook on it.


Marriage by H. G. Wells

[System] You are a helpful assistant. You will be given a passage from a book. Read it carefully, then summarize it in exactly 500 words and give a brief outlook on it.

[User]
Context:

CHAPTER THE FIRST

A DAY WITH THE POPES

Sec. 1

An extremely pretty girl occupied a second-class compartment in one of
those trains which percolate through the rural tranquillities of middle
England from Ganford in Oxfordshire to Rumbold Junction in Kent. She was
going to join her family at Buryhamstreet after a visit to some
Gloucestershire friends. Her father, Mr. Pope, once a leader in the
coach-building world and now by retirement a gentleman, had taken the
Buryhamstreet vicarage furnished for two months (beginning on the
fifteenth of July) at his maximum summer rental of seven guineas a week.
His daughter was on her way to this retreat.

At first she had been an animated traveller, erect and keenly regardful
of every detail upon the platforms of the stations at which her
conveyance lingered, but the tedium of the journey and the warmth of the
sunny afternoon had relaxed her pose by imperceptible degrees, and she
sat now comfortably in the corner, with her neat toes upon the seat
before her, ready to drop them primly at the first sign of a
fellow-traveller. Her expression lapsed more and more towards an almost
somnolent reverie. She wished she had not taken a second-class ticket,
because then she might have afforded a cup of tea at Reading, and so
fortified herself against this insinuating indolence.

She was travelling second class, instead of third as she ought to have
done, through one of those lapses so inevitable to young people in her
position. The two Carmel boys and a cousin, two greyhounds and a chow
had come to see her off; they had made a brilliant and prosperous group
on the platform and extorted the manifest admiration of two youthful
porters, and it had been altogether too much for Marjorie Pope to admit
it was the family custom--except when her father's nerves had to be
considered--to go third class. So she had made a hasty calculation--she
knew her balance to a penny because of the recent tipping--and found it
would just run to it. Fourpence remained,--and there would be a porter
at Buryhamstreet!

Her mother had said: "You will have Ample." Well, opinions of amplitude
vary. With numerous details fresh in her mind, Marjorie decided it would
be wiser to avoid financial discussion during her first few days at
Buryhamstreet.

There was much in Marjorie's equipment in the key of travelling second
class at the sacrifice of afternoon tea. There was, for example, a
certain quiet goodness of style about her clothes, though the skirt
betrayed age, and an entire absence of style about her luggage, which
was all in the compartment with her, and which consisted of a distended
hold-all, a very good tennis racquet in a stretcher, a portmanteau of
cheap white basketwork held together by straps, and a very new,
expensive-looking and meretricious dressing-bag of imitation morocco,
which had been one of her chief financial errors at Oxbridge. The
collection was eloquent indeed of incompatible standards....

Marjorie had a chin that was small in size if resolute in form, and a
mouth that was not noticeably soft and weak because it was conspicuously
soft and pretty. Her nose was delicately aquiline and very subtly and
finely modelled, and she looked out upon the world with steady,
grey-blue eyes beneath broad, level brows that contradicted in a large
measure the hint of weakness below. She had an abundance of copper-red
hair, which flowed back very prettily from her broad, low forehead and
over her delicate ears, and she had that warm-tinted clear skin that
goes so well with reddish hair. She had a very dainty neck, and the long
slender lines of her body were full of the promise of a riper beauty.
She had the good open shoulders of a tennis-player and a swimmer. Some
day she was to be a tall, ruddy, beautiful woman. She wore simple
clothes of silvery grey and soft green, and about her waist was a belt
of grey leather in which there now wilted two creamy-petalled roses.

That was the visible Marjorie. Somewhere out of time and space was an
invisible Marjorie who looked out on the world with those steady eyes,
and smiled or drooped with the soft red lips, and dreamt, and wondered,
and desired.

Sec. 2

What a queer thing the invisible human being would appear if, by some
discovery as yet inconceivable, some spiritual X-ray photography, we
could flash it into sight! Long ago I read a book called "Soul Shapes"
that was full of ingenious ideas, but I doubt very much if the thing so
revealed would have any shape, any abiding solid outline at all. It is
something more fluctuating and discursive than that--at any rate, for
every one young enough not to have set and hardened. Things come into
it and become it, things drift out of it and cease to be it, things turn
upside down in it and change and colour and dissolve, and grow and eddy
about and blend into each other. One might figure it, I suppose, as a
preposterous jumble animated by a will; a floundering disconnectedness
through which an old hump of impulse rises and thrusts unaccountably; a
river beast of purpose wallowing in a back eddy of mud and weeds and
floating objects and creatures drowned. Now the sunshine of gladness
makes it all vivid, now it is sombre and grimly insistent under the sky
of some darkling mood, now an emotional gale sweeps across it and it is
one confused agitation....

And surely these invisible selves of men were never so jumbled, so
crowded, complicated, and stirred about as they are at the present time.
Once I am told they had a sort of order, were sphered in religious
beliefs, crystal clear, were arranged in a cosmogony that fitted them as
hand fits glove, were separated by definite standards of right and wrong
which presented life as planned in all its essential aspects from the
cradle to the grave. Things are so no longer. That sphere is broken for
most of us; even if it is tied about and mended again, it is burst like
a seed case; things have fallen out and things have fallen in....

Can I convey in any measure how it was with Marjorie?

What was her religion?

In college forms and returns, and suchlike documents, she would describe
herself as "Church of England." She had been baptized according to the
usages of that body, but she had hitherto evaded confirmation into it,
and although it is a large, wealthy, and powerful organization with
many minds to serve it, it had never succeeded in getting into her quick
and apprehensive intelligence any lucid and persuasive conception of
what it considered God and the universe were up to with her. It had
failed to catch her attention and state itself to her. A number of
humorous and other writers and the general trend of talk around her, and
perhaps her own shrewd little observation of superficial things, had, on
the other hand, created a fairly definite belief in her that it wasn't
as a matter of fact up to very much at all, that what it said wasn't
said with that absolute honesty which is a logical necessity in every
religious authority, and that its hierarchy had all sorts of political
and social considerations confusing its treatment of her immortal
soul....

Marjorie followed her father in abstaining from church. He too professed
himself "Church of England," but he was, if we are to set aside merely
superficial classifications, an irascible atheist with a respect for
usage and Good Taste, and an abject fear of the disapproval of other
gentlemen of his class. For the rest he secretly disliked clergymen on
account of the peculiarity of their collars, and a certain influence
they had with women. When Marjorie at the age of fourteen had displayed
a hankering after ecclesiastical ceremony and emotional religion, he had
declared: "We don't want any of _that_ nonsense," and sent her into the
country to a farm where there were young calves and a bottle-fed lamb
and kittens. At times her mother went to church and displayed
considerable orthodoxy and punctilio, at times the good lady didn't, and
at times she thought in a broad-minded way that there was a Lot in
Christian Science, and subjected herself to the ministrations of an
American named Silas Root. But his ministrations were too expensive for
continuous use, and so the old faith did not lose its hold upon the
family altogether.

       *       *       *       *       *

At school Marjorie had been taught what I may best describe as Muffled
Christianity--a temperate and discreet system designed primarily not to
irritate parents, in which the painful symbol of the crucifixion and the
riddle of what Salvation was to save her from, and, indeed, the coarser
aspects of religion generally, were entirely subordinate to images of
amiable perambulations, and a rich mist of finer feelings. She had been
shielded, not only from arguments against her religion, but from
arguments for it--the two things go together--and I do not think it was
particularly her fault if she was now growing up like the great majority
of respectable English people, with her religious faculty as it were,
artificially faded, and an acquired disposition to regard any
speculation of why she was, and whence and whither, as rather foolish,
not very important, and in the very worst possible taste.

And so, the crystal globe being broken which once held souls together,
you may expect to find her a little dispersed and inconsistent in her
motives, and with none of that assurance a simpler age possessed of the
exact specification of goodness or badness, the exact delimitation of
right and wrong. Indeed, she did not live in a world of right and wrong,
or anything so stern; "horrid" and "jolly" had replaced these archaic
orientations. In a world where a mercantile gentility has conquered
passion and God is neither blasphemed nor adored, there necessarily
arises this generation of young people, a little perplexed, indeed, and
with a sense of something missing, but feeling their way inevitably at
last to the great releasing question, "Then why shouldn't we have a
good time?"

Yet there was something in Marjorie, as in most human beings, that
demanded some general idea, some aim, to hold her life together. A girl
upon the borders of her set at college was fond of the phrase "living
for the moment," and Marjorie associated with it the speaker's lax
mouth, sloe-like eyes, soft, quick-flushing, boneless face, and a habit
of squawking and bouncing in a forced and graceless manner. Marjorie's
natural disposition was to deal with life in a steadier spirit than
that. Yet all sorts of powers and forces were at work in her, some
exalted, some elvish, some vulgar, some subtle. She felt keenly and
desired strongly, and in effect she came perhaps nearer the realization
of that offending phrase than its original exponent. She had a clean
intensity of feeling that made her delight in a thousand various things,
in sunlight and textures, and the vividly quick acts of animals, in
landscape, and the beauty of other girls, in wit, and people's voices,
and good strong reasoning, and the desire and skill of art. She had a
clear, rapid memory that made her excel perhaps a little too easily at
school and college, an eagerness of sympathetic interest that won people
very quickly and led to disappointments, and a very strong sense of the
primary importance of Miss Marjorie Pope in the world. And when any very
definite dream of what she would like to be and what she would like to
do, such as being the principal of a ladies' college, or the first woman
member of Parliament, or the wife of a barbaric chief in Borneo, or a
great explorer, or the wife of a millionaire and a great social leader,
or George Sand, or Saint Teresa, had had possession of her imagination
for a few weeks, an entirely contrasted and equally attractive dream
would presently arise beside it and compete with it and replace it. It
wasn't so much that she turned against the old one as that she was
attracted by the new, and she forgot the old dream rather than abandoned
it, simply because she was only one person, and hadn't therefore the
possibility of realizing both.

In certain types Marjorie's impressionability aroused a passion of
proselytism. People of the most diverse kinds sought to influence her,
and they invariably did so. Quite a number of people, including her
mother and the principal of her college, believed themselves to be the
leading influence in her life. And this was particularly the case with
her aunt Plessington. Her aunt Plessington was devoted to social and
political work of an austere and aggressive sort (in which Mr.
Plessington participated); she was childless, and had a Movement of her
own, the Good Habits Movement, a progressive movement of the utmost
scope and benevolence which aimed at extensive interferences with the
food and domestic intimacies of the more defenceless lower classes by
means ultimately of legislation, and she had Marjorie up to see her,
took her for long walks while she influenced with earnestness and
vigour, and at times had an air of bequeathing her mantle, movement and
everything, quite definitely to her "little Madge." She spoke of
training her niece to succeed her, and bought all the novels of Mrs.
Humphry Ward for her as they appeared, in the hope of quickening in her
that flame of politico-social ambition, that insatiable craving for
dinner-parties with important guests, which is so distinctive of the
more influential variety of English womanhood. It was due rather to her
own habit of monologue than to any reserve on the part of Marjorie that
she entertained the belief that her niece was entirely acquiescent in
these projects. They went into Marjorie's mind and passed. For nearly a
week, it is true, she had dramatized herself as the angel and
inspiration of some great modern statesman, but this had been ousted by
a far more insistent dream, begotten by a picture she had seen in some
exhibition, of a life of careless savagery, whose central and constantly
recurrent incident was the riding of barebacked horses out of
deep-shadowed forest into a foamy sunlit sea--in a costume that would
certainly have struck Aunt Plessington as a mistake.

If you could have seen Marjorie in her railway compartment, with the
sunshine, sunshine mottled by the dirty window, tangled in her hair and
creeping to and fro over her face as the train followed the curves of
the line, you would certainly have agreed with me that she was pretty,
and you might even have thought her beautiful. But it was necessary to
fall in love with Marjorie before you could find her absolutely
beautiful. You might have speculated just what business was going on
behind those drowsily thoughtful eyes. If you are--as people
say--"Victorian," you might even have whispered "Day Dreams," at the
sight of her....

She _was_ dreaming, and in a sense she was thinking of beautiful things.
But only mediately. She was thinking how very much she would enjoy
spending freely and vigorously, quite a considerable amount of
money,--heaps of money.

You see, the Carmels, with whom she had just been staying, were
shockingly well off. They had two motor cars with them in the country,
and the boys had the use of the second one as though it was just an old
bicycle. Marjorie had had a cheap white dinner-dress, made the year
before by a Chelsea French girl, a happy find of her mother's, and it
was shapely and simple and not at all bad, and she had worn her green
beads and her Egyptian necklace of jade; but Kitty Carmel and her sister
had had a new costume nearly every night, and pretty bracelets, and
rubies, big pearls, and woven gold, and half a score of delightful and
precious things for neck and hair. Everything in the place was bright
and good and abundant, the servants were easy and well-mannered, without
a trace of hurry or resentment, and one didn't have to be sharp about
the eggs and things at breakfast in the morning, or go without. All
through the day, and even when they had gone to bathe from the smart
little white and green shed on the upper lake, Marjorie had been made to
feel the insufficiency of her equipment. Kitty Carmel, being twenty-one,
possessed her own cheque-book and had accounts running at half a dozen
West-end shops; and both sisters had furnished their own rooms according
to their taste, with a sense of obvious effect that had set Marjorie
speculating just how a room might be done by a girl with a real eye for
colour and a real brain behind it....

The train slowed down for the seventeenth time. Marjorie looked up and
read "Buryhamstreet."

Sec. 3

Her reverie vanished, and by a complex but almost instantaneous movement
she had her basket off the rack and the carriage door open. She became
teeming anticipations. There, advancing in a string, were Daffy, her
elder sister, Theodore, her younger brother, and the dog Toupee. Sydney
and Rom hadn't come. Daffy was not copper red like her sister, but
really quite coarsely red-haired; she was bigger than Marjorie, and with
irregular teeth instead of Marjorie's neat row; she confessed them in a
broad simple smile of welcome. Theodore was hatless, rustily
fuzzy-headed, and now a wealth of quasi-humorous gesture. The dog Toupee
was straining at a leash, and doing its best in a yapping, confused
manner, to welcome the wrong people by getting its lead round their
legs.

"Toupee!" cried Marjorie, waving the basket. "Toupee!"

They all called it Toupee because it was like one, but the name was
forbidden in her father's hearing. Her father had decided that the
proper name for a family dog in England is Towser, and did his utmost to
suppress a sobriquet that was at once unprecedented and not in the best
possible taste. Which was why the whole family, with the exception of
Mrs. Pope, of course, stuck to Toupee....

Marjorie flashed a second's contrast with the Carmel splendours.

"Hullo, old Daffy. What's it like?" she asked, handing out the basket as
her sister came up.

"It's a lark," said Daffy. "Where's the dressing-bag?"

"Thoddy," said Marjorie, following up the dressing-bag with the
hold-all. "Lend a hand."

"Stow it, Toupee," said Theodore, and caught the hold-all in time.

In another moment Marjorie was out of the train, had done the swift
kissing proper to the occasion, and rolled a hand over Toupee's
head--Toupee, who, after a passionate lunge at a particularly savoury
drover from the next compartment, was now frantically trying to indicate
that Marjorie was the one human being he had ever cared for. Brother and
sister were both sketching out the state of affairs at Buryhamstreet
Vicarage in rapid competitive jerks, each eager to tell things
first--and the whole party moved confusedly towards the station exit.
Things pelted into Marjorie's mind.

"We've got an old donkey-cart. I thought we shouldn't get here--ever....
Madge, we can go up the church tower whenever we like, only old Daffy
won't let me shin up the flagstaff. It's _perfectly_ safe--you couldn't
fall off if you tried.... Had positively to get out at the level
crossing and _pull_ him over.... There's a sort of moat in the
garden.... You never saw such furniture, Madge! And the study! It's hung
with texts, and stuffed with books about the Scarlet Woman.... Piano's
rather good, it's a Broadwood.... The Dad's got a war on about the
tennis net. Oh, frightful! You'll see. It won't keep up. He's had a
letter kept waiting by the _Times_ for a fortnight, and it's a terror at
breakfast. Says the motor people have used influence to silence him.
Says that's a game two can play at.... Old Sid got herself upset
stuffing windfalls. Rather a sell for old Sid, considering how refined
she's getting...."

There was a brief lull as the party got into the waiting governess cart.
Toupee, after a preliminary refusal to enter, made a determined attempt
on the best seat, from which he would be able to bark in a persistent,
official manner at anything that passed. That suppressed, and Theodore's
proposal to drive refused, they were able to start, and attention was
concentrated upon Daffy's negotiation of the station approach. Marjorie
turned on her brother with a smile of warm affection.

"How are you, old Theodore?"

"I'm all right, old Madge."

"Mummy?"

"Every one's all right," said Theodore; "if it wasn't for that damned
infernal net----"

"Ssssh!" cried both sisters together.

"_He_ says it," said Theodore.

Both sisters conveyed a grave and relentless disapproval.

"Pretty bit of road," said Marjorie. "I like that little house at the
corner."

A pause and the eyes of the sisters met.

"_He's_ here," said Daffy.

Marjorie affected ignorance.

"Who's here?"

"_Il vostro senior Miraculoso_."

"Just as though a fellow couldn't understand your kiddy little Italian,"
said Theodore, pulling Toupee's ear.

"Oh well, I thought he might be," said Marjorie, regardless of her
brother.

"Oh!" said Daffy. "I didn't know----"

Both sisters looked at each other, and then both glanced at Theodore. He
met Marjorie's eyes with a grimace of profound solemnity.

"Little brothers," he said, "shouldn't know. Just as though they didn't!
Rot! But let's change the subject, my dears, all the same. Lemme see.
There are a new sort of flea on Toupee, Madge, that he gets from the
hens."

"_Is_ a new sort," corrected Daffy. "He's horrider than ever, Madge. He
leaves his soap in soak now to make us think he has used it. This is the
village High Street. Isn't it jolly?"

"Corners don't _bite_ people," said Theodore, with a critical eye to the
driving.

Marjorie surveyed the High Street, while Daffy devoted a few moments to
Theodore.

The particular success of the village was its brace of chestnut trees
which, with that noble disregard of triteness which is one of the charms
of villages the whole world over, shadowed the village smithy. On either
side of the roadway between it and the paths was a careless width of
vivid grass protected by white posts, which gave way to admit a generous
access on either hand to a jolly public house, leering over red blinds,
and swinging a painted sign against its competitor. Several of the
cottages had real thatch and most had porches; they had creepers nailed
to their faces, and their gardens, crowded now with flowers, marigolds,
begonias, snapdragon, delphiniums, white foxgloves, and monkshood,
seemed almost too good to be true. The doctor's house was pleasantly
Georgian, and the village shop, which was also a post and telegraph
office, lay back with a slight air of repletion, keeping its bulging
double shop-windows wide open in a manifest attempt not to fall asleep.
Two score of shock-headed boys and pinafored girls were drilling upon a
bald space of ground before the village school, and near by, the
national emotion at the ever-memorable Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria
had evoked an artistic drinking-fountain of grey stone. Beyond the
subsequent green--there were the correctest geese thereon--the village
narrowed almost to a normal road again, and then, recalling itself with
a start, lifted a little to the churchyard wall about the grey and ample
church. "It's just like all the villages that ever were," said Marjorie,
and gave a cry of delight when Daffy, pointing to the white gate between
two elm trees that led to the vicarage, remarked: "That's us."

In confirmation of which statement, Sydney and Rom, the two sisters next
in succession to Marjorie, and with a strong tendency to be twins in
spite of the year between them, appeared in a state of vociferous
incivility opening the way for the donkey-carriage. Sydney was Sydney,
and Rom was just short for Romola--one of her mother's favourite
heroines in fiction.

"Old Madge," they said; and then throwing respect to the winds, "Old
Gargoo!" which was Marjorie's forbidden nickname, and short for gargoyle
(though surely only Victorian Gothic, ever produced a gargoyle that had
the remotest right to be associated with the neat brightness of
Marjorie's face).

She overlooked the offence, and the pseudo-twins boarded the cart from
behind, whereupon the already overburthened donkey, being old and in a
manner wise, quickened his pace for the house to get the whole thing
over.

"It's really an avenue," said Daffy; but Marjorie, with her mind strung
up to the Carmel standards, couldn't agree. It was like calling a row of
boy-scouts Potsdam grenadiers. The trees were at irregular distances, of
various ages, and mostly on one side. Still it was a shady, pleasant
approach.

And the vicarage was truly very interesting and amusing. To these
Londoners accustomed to live in a state of compression, elbows
practically touching, in a tall, narrow fore-and-aft stucco house, all
window and staircase, in a despondent Brompton square, there was an
effect of maundering freedom about the place, of enlargement almost to
the pitch of adventure and sunlight to the pitch of intoxication. The
house itself was long and low, as if a London house holidaying in the
country had flung itself asprawl; it had two disconnected and roomy
staircases, and when it had exhausted itself completely as a house, it
turned to the right and began again as rambling, empty stables, coach
house, cart sheds, men's bedrooms up ladders, and outhouses of the most
various kinds. On one hand was a neglected orchard, in the front of the
house was a bald, worried-looking lawn area capable of simultaneous
tennis and croquet, and at the other side a copious and confused
vegetable and flower garden full of roses, honesty, hollyhocks, and
suchlike herbaceous biennials and perennials, lapsed at last into
shrubbery, where a sickle-shaped, weedy lagoon of uncertain aims, which
had evidently, as a rustic bridge and a weeping willow confessed,
aspired to be an "ornamental water," declined at last to ducks. And
there was access to the church, and the key of the church tower, and one
went across the corner of the lawn, and by a little iron gate into the
churchyard to decipher inscriptions, as if the tombs of all
Buryhamstreet were no more than a part of the accommodation relinquished
by the vicar's household.

Marjorie was hurried over the chief points of all this at a breakneck
pace by Sydney and Rom, and when Sydney was called away to the horrors
of practice--for Sydney in spite of considerable reluctance was destined
by her father to be "the musical one"--Rom developed a copious
affection, due apparently to some occult aesthetic influence in
Marjorie's silvery-grey and green, and led her into the unlocked vestry,
and there prayed in a whisper that she might be given "one good hug,
just _one_"--and so they came out with their arms about each other very
affectionately to visit the lagoon again. And then Rom remembered that
Marjorie hadn't seen either the walnut-tree in the orchard, or the hen
with nine chicks....

Somewhere among all these interests came tea and Mrs. Pope.

Mrs. Pope kissed her daughter with an air of having really wanted to
kiss her half an hour ago, but of having been distracted since. She was
a fine-featured, anxious-looking little woman, with a close resemblance
to all her children, in spite of the fact that they were markedly
dissimilar one to the other, except only that they took their ruddy
colourings from their father. She was dressed in a neat blue dress that
had perhaps been hurriedly chosen, and her method of doing her hair was
a manifest compromise between duty and pleasure. She embarked at once
upon an exposition of the bedroom arrangements, which evidently involved
difficult issues. Marjorie was to share a room with Daffy--that was the
gist of it--as the only other available apartment, originally promised
to Marjorie, had been secured by Mr. Pope for what he called his
"matutinal ablutions, _videlicet_ tub."

"Then, when your Aunt Plessington comes, you won't have to move," said
Mrs. Pope with an air of a special concession. "Your father's looking
forward to seeing you, but he mustn't be disturbed just yet. He's in the
vicar's study. He's had his tea in there. He's writing a letter to the
_Times_ answering something they said in a leader, and also a private
note calling attention to their delay in printing his previous
communication, and he wants to be delicately ironical without being in
any way offensive. He wants to hint without actually threatening that
very probably he will go over to the _Spectator_ altogether if they do
not become more attentive. The _Times_ used to print his letters
punctually, but latterly these automobile people seem to have got hold
of it.... He has the window on the lawn open, so that I think, perhaps,
we'd better not stay out here--for fear our voices might disturb him."

"Better get right round the other side of the church," said Daffy.

"He'd hear far less of us if we went indoors," said Mrs. Pope.

Sec. 4

The vicarage seemed tight packed with human interest for Marjorie and
her mother and sisters. Going over houses is one of the amusements
proper to her sex, and she and all three sisters and her mother, as soon
as they had finished an inaudible tea, went to see the bedroom she was
to share with Daffy, and then examined, carefully and in order, the
furniture and decoration of the other bedrooms, went through the rooms
downstairs, always excepting and avoiding very carefully and closing as
many doors as possible on, and hushing their voices whenever they
approached the study in which her father was being delicately ironical
without being offensive to the _Times_. None of them had seen any of the
vicarage people at all--Mr. Pope had come on a bicycle and managed all
the negotiations--and it was curious to speculate about the individuals
whose personalities pervaded the worn and faded furnishings of the
place.

The Popes' keen-eyed inspection came at times, I think, dangerously near
prying. The ideals of decoration and interests of the vanished family
were so absolutely dissimilar to the London standards as to arouse a
sort of astonished wonder in their minds. Some of the things they
decided were perfectly hideous, some quaint, some were simply and weakly
silly. Everything was different from Hartstone Square. Daffy was perhaps
more inclined to contempt, and Mrs. Pope to refined amusement and witty
appreciation than Marjorie. Marjorie felt there was something in these
people that she didn't begin to understand, she needed some missing
clue that would unlock the secret of their confused peculiarity. She was
one of those people who have an almost instinctive turn for decoration
in costume and furniture; she had already had a taste of how to do
things in arranging her rooms at Bennett College, Oxbridge, where also
she was in great demand among the richer girls as an adviser. She knew
what it was to try and fail as well as to try and succeed, and these
people, she felt, hadn't tried for anything she comprehended. She
couldn't quite see why it was that there was at the same time an attempt
at ornament and a disregard of beauty, she couldn't quite do as her
mother did and dismiss it as an absurdity and have done with it. She
couldn't understand, too, why everything should be as if it were faded
and weakened from something originally bright and clear.

All the rooms were thick with queer little objects that indicated a
quite beaver-like industry in the production of "work." There were
embroidered covers for nearly every article on the wash-hand-stand, and
mats of wool and crochet wherever anything stood on anything; there were
"tidies" everywhere, and odd little brackets covered with gilded and
varnished fir cones and bearing framed photographs and little jars and
all sorts of colourless, dusty little objects, and everywhere on the
walls tacks sustained crossed fans with badly painted flowers or
transfer pictures. There was a jar on the bedroom mantel covered with
varnished postage stamps and containing grey-haired dried grasses. There
seemed to be a moral element in all this, for in the room Sydney shared
with Rom there was a decorative piece of lettering which declared that--

    "Something attempted, something done,
    Has earned a night's repose."

There were a great number of texts that set Marjorie's mind stirring
dimly with intimations of a missed significance. Over her own bed,
within the lattice of an Oxford frame, was the photograph of a picture
of an extremely composed young woman in a trailing robe, clinging to the
Rock of Ages in the midst of histrionically aggressive waves, and she
had a feeling, rather than a thought, that perhaps for all the oddity of
the presentation it did convey something acutely desirable, that she
herself had had moods when she would have found something very
comforting in just such an impassioned grip. And on a framed,
floriferous card, these incomprehensible words:

    |================================|
    |THY GRACE IS SUFFICIENT FOR ME. |
    |================================|

seemed to be saying something to her tantalizingly just outside her
range of apprehension.

Did all these things light up somehow to those dispossessed people--from
some angle she didn't attain? Were they living and moving realities when
those others were at home again?

The drawing-room had no texts; it was altogether more pretentious and
less haunted by the faint and faded flavour of religion that pervaded
the bedrooms. It had, however, evidences of travel in Switzerland and
the Mediterranean. There was a piano in black and gold, a little out of
tune, and surmounted by a Benares brass jar, enveloping a scarlet
geranium in a pot. There was a Japanese screen of gold wrought upon
black, that screened nothing. There was a framed chromo-lithograph of
Jerusalem hot in the sunset, and another of Jerusalem cold under a
sub-tropical moon, and there were gourds, roses of Jericho, sandalwood
rosaries and kindred trash from the Holy Land in no little profusion
upon a what-not. Such books as the room had contained had been arranged
as symmetrically as possible about a large, pink-shaded lamp upon the
claret- cloth of a round table, and were to be replaced, Mrs.
Pope said, at their departure. At present they were piled on a
side-table. The girls had been through them all, and were ready with the
choicer morsels for Marjorie's amusement. There was "Black Beauty," the
sympathetic story of a soundly Anglican horse, and a large Bible
extra-illustrated with photographs of every well-known scriptural
picture from Michael Angelo to Dore, and a book of injunctions to young
ladies upon their behaviour and deportment that Rom and Sydney found
particularly entertaining. Marjorie discovered that Sydney had picked up
a new favourite phrase. "I'm afraid we're all dreadfully cynical," said
Sydney, several times.

A more advanced note was struck by a copy of "Aurora Leigh," richly
underlined in pencil, but with exclamation marks at some of the bolder
passages....

And presently, still avoiding the open study window very elaborately,
this little group of twentieth century people went again into the
church--the church whose foundations were laid in A.D. 912--foundations
of rubble and cement that included flat Roman bricks from a still
remoter basilica. Their voices dropped instinctively, as

Question: Summarize the above passage in exactly 500 words and give a brief outlook on it.