Children from such men! Oh God, oh God!

Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had made a difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal–seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal–workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!

Connie was glad to be home, to bury her head in the sand. She was glad even to babble to Clifford. For her fear of the mining and iron Midlands affected her with a queer feeling that went all over her, like influenza.

‘Of course I had to have tea in Miss Bentley’s shop,’ she said.

‘Really! Winter would have given you tea.’

‘Oh yes, but I daren’t disappoint Miss Bentley.’ Miss Bentley was a shallow old maid with a rather large nose and romantic disposition who served tea with a careful intensity worthy of a sacrament.

‘Did she ask after me?’ said Clifford.

‘Of course!—. MAY I ask your Ladyship how Sir Clifford is!—I believe she ranks you even higher than Nurse Cavell!’

‘And I suppose you said I was blooming.’

‘Yes! And she looked as rapt as if I had said the heavens had opened to you. I said if she ever came to Tevershall she was to come to see you.’

‘Me! Whatever for! See me!’

‘Why yes, Clifford. You can’t be so adored without making some slight return. Saint George of Cappadocia was nothing to you, in her eyes.’

‘And do you think she’ll come?’

‘Oh, she blushed! and looked quite beautiful for a moment, poor thing! Why don’t men marry the women who would really adore them?’

‘The women start adoring too late. But did she say she’d come?’

‘Oh!’ Connie imitated the breathless Miss Bentley, ‘your Ladyship, if ever I should dare to presume!’

‘Dare to presume! how absurd! But I hope to God she won’t turn up. And how was her tea?’

‘Oh, Lipton’s and VERY strong. But Clifford, do you realize you are the ROMAN DE LA ROSE of Miss Bentley and lots like her?’

‘I’m not flattered, even then.’