“It bores me. I’m not interested in your peccadilloes.”
“And I don’t care whether you are or not—I am.”
The morning was again sunny. The maid had been in and brought the water, and had drawn the curtains. Birkin, sitting up in bed, looked lazily and pleasantly out on the park, that was so green and deserted, romantic, belonging to the past. He was thinking how lovely, how sure, how formed, how final all the things of the past were—the lovely accomplished past—this house, so still and golden, the park slumbering its centuries of peace. And then, what a snare and a delusion, this beauty of static things—what a horrible, dead prison Breadalby really was, what an intolerable confinement, the peace! Yet it was better than the sordid scrambling conflict of the present. If only one might create the future after one’s own heart—for a little pure truth, a little unflinching application of simple truth to life, the heart cried out ceaselessly.
“I can’t see what you will leave me at all, to be interested in,” came Gerald’s voice from the lower room. “Neither the Pussums, nor the mines, nor anything else.”
“You be interested in what you can, Gerald. Only I’m not interested myself,” said Birkin.
“What am I to do at all, then?” came Gerald’s voice.
“What you like. What am I to do myself?”
In the silence Birkin could feel Gerald musing this fact.
“I’m blest if I know,” came the good-humoured answer.
“You see,” said Birkin, “part of you wants the Pussum, and nothing but the Pussum, part of you wants the mines, the business, and nothing but the business—and there you are—all in bits—”