to which they could not attain because they were too dumb, and every approach to close connection was blocked by their clumsy contempt of other people. They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.
Paul fell under Mrs. Leiver’s spell. Everything had a religious and intensified meaning when he was with her. His soul, hurt, highly developed, sought her as if for nourishment. Together they seemed to sift the vital fact from an experience.
Miriam was her mother’s daughter. In the sunshine of the afternoon mother and daughter went down the fields with him. They looked for nests. There was a jenny wren’s in the hedge by the orchard.
“I do want you to see this,” said Mrs. Leivers.
He crouched down and carefully put his finger through the thorns into the round door of the nest.
“It’s almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird,” he said, “it’s so warm. They say a bird makes its nest round like a cup with pressing its breast on it. Then how did it make the ceiling round, I wonder?”
The nest seemed to start into life for the two women. After that, Miriam came to see it every day. It seemed so close to her. Again, going down the hedgeside with the girl, he noticed the celandines, scalloped splashes of gold, on the side of the ditch.
“I like them,” he said, “when their petals go flat back with the sunshine. They seem to be pressing themselves at the sun.”
And then the celandines ever after drew her with a little spell. Anthropomorphic as she was, she stimulated him into appreciating things thus, and then they lived for her. She seemed to need things kindling in her imagination or in her soul before she felt she had them. And she was cut off from ordinary life by her religious intensity which made the world for her either a nunnery garden or a paradise, where sin and knowledge were not, or else an ugly, cruel thing.
So it was in this atmosphere of subtle intimacy, this meeting in their common feeling for something in nature, that their love started.
Personally, he was a long time before he realized her. For
