The earth she would have had him labor in, was such as now would soil his hands. It was enjoyment he sought, she knew it well, not life. With that poison of inheritance they had instilled into his blood, fast he was becoming an echo, not a voice. The message of all ideals was being stilled to silence in him. They were teaching him to say what the Liddiards had said one generation upon another--gain and keep, gain and keep--it would be folly to give away.
Only in this, this love that stirred him to the very essence of his being, was he recalling the years of emotion she had given to the fashioning of his soul. Here for that moment as he lay in her arms, he was the man her heart had meant to make him, awed by love, made timorous almost by the power of his passion.
But how long would it survive its contact with that casual materialism his Dorothy would blend it with? How soon before she made his love that habit of the sexes which bore no more than drifting consequences upon its stream?
Neither long would it be, nor had she power now to intervene. Clasping her arm more tightly round him, already she felt him slipping from her, the more because in that brief moment he was so much her own.
"My dearest, need you tell her yet?" she asked. "I know you feel a man, but you're still so young. You're only eighteen, you couldn't marry yet. Liddiard wouldn't want you to marry. Need you tell her yet?"
"I must," he muttered. "Not for a little while yet perhaps. I've told you. That was a help. I don't feel so much of a brute as I did. But sooner or later I shall have to. I can't help being young and I'm not inventing what I feel. Other chaps feel it too, quite decent fellows, but somehow or other I can't do what they do."
"What do they do?"
Frankly she would have admitted that was curiosity, but curious only was she to know what he did not do rather than what they did.
"What do they do, John?" she repeated as he lay there, silent.
"Oh, they go up to London when they get the chance. There are women, you wouldn't understand that, Mater. Probably you've never known there were women like that. How could you have known down here? My God! Fancy one of those women in the fields! She'd drop down in the grass and she'd hide her face. Anyhow in streets they keep their heads up. They look at you in the streets."