"We can't. They've seen us."
"Everybody sees us," Roddy said.
He began to walk with a queer, defiant, self-conscious jerk.
Mrs. Waugh came on, buoyantly, as if the hoop of a crinoline still held her up.
"Well, Mary, going for another walk?"
She stopped, in a gracious mood to show off her son. When she looked at
Roddy her raised eyebrows said, "Still here, doing nothing?"
"Norman's going back to work on Monday," she said.
The son stood aside, uninterested, impatient, staring past them, beating the road with his stick. He was thickset and square. He had the stooping head and heavy eyes of a bull. Black hair and eyebrows grew bushily from his dull-white Frewin skin.
He would be an engineer. Mr. Belk's brother had taken him into his works at Durlingham. He wasn't seventeen, yet he knew how to make engines. He had a strong, lumbering body. His heart would go on thump-thumping with regular strokes, like a stupid piston, not like Roddy's heart, excited, quivering, hurrying, suddenly checking. His eyes drew his mother away. You were glad when they were gone.
"You can see what they think," Roddy said. "Everybody thinks it."