“Because you’re not; because you’re different inside, like a pine-tree, and then you flare up; but you’re not just like an ordinary tree, with fidgety leaves and jolly——”
He got tangled up in his own speech; but she brooded on it, and he had a strange, roused sensation, as if his feelings were new. She got so near him. It was a strange stimulant.
Then sometimes he hated her. Her youngest brother was only five. He was a frail lad, with immense brown eyes in his quaint, fragile face—one of Reynolds’s “Choir of Angels,” with a touch of elf. Often Miriam kneeled to the child and drew him to her.
“Eh, my Hubert!” she sang, in a voice heavy and surcharged with love. “Eh, my Hubert!”
And, folding him in her arms, she swayed slightly from side to side with love, her face half lifted, her eyes half closed, her voice drenched with love.
“Don’t!” said the child, uneasy—“don’t, Miriam!”
“Yes; you love me, don’t you?” she murmured deep in her throat, almost as if she were in a trance, and swaying also as if she were swooned in an ecstasy of love.
“Don’t!” repeated the child, a frown on his clear brow.
“You love me, don’t you?” she murmured.
“What do you make such a fuss for?” cried Paul, all in suffering because of her extreme emotion. “Why can’t you be ordinary with him?”
She let the child go, and rose, and said nothing. Her intensity, which would leave no emotion on a normal plane, irritated the youth into a frenzy. And this fearful, naked contact of her on small occasions shocked him. He was used to his mother’s reserve. And on such occasions he was thankful in his heart and soul that he had his mother, so sane and wholesome.
All the life of Miriam’s body was in her eyes, which were usually dark as a dark church, but could flame with light like a conflagration. Her face scarcely ever altered from its look of brooding. She might have been one of the women who went with Mary when Jesus was dead. Her body was not flexible and living. She walked with a swing, rather heavily, her head bowed forward, pondering. She was not clumsy, and yet none of her movements seemed quite the movement. Often, when wiping the dishes, she would stand in bewilderment and chagrin because she had pulled in two halves a cup or a tumbler. It was as if, in her fear and self-mistrust, she put too much strength into the effort. There
