Morel looked down ruefully at his sides.
“Me!” he exclaimed. “I’m nowt b’r a skinned rabbit. My bones fair juts out on me.”
“I should like to know where,” retorted his wife.
“Iv’ry-wheer! I’m nobbut a sack o’ faggots.”
Mrs. Morel laughed. He had still a wonderfully young body, muscular, without any fat. His skin was smooth and clear. It might have been the body of a man of twenty-eight, except that there were, perhaps, too many blue scars, like tattoo-marks, where the coal-dust remained under the skin, and that his chest was too hairy. But he put his hand on his sides ruefully. It was his fixed belief that, because he did not get fat, he was as thin as a starved rat.
Paul looked at his father’s thick, brownish hands all scarred, with broken nails, rubbing the fine smoothness of his sides, and the incongruity struck him. It seemed strange they were the same flesh.
“I suppose,” he said to his father, “you had a good figure once.”
“Eh!” exclaimed the miner, glancing round, startled and timid, like a child.
“He had,” exclaimed Mrs. Morel, “if he didn’t hurtle himself up as if he was trying to get in the smallest space he could.”
“Me!” exclaimed Morel—“me a good figure! I wor niver much more n’r a skeleton.”
“Man!” cried his wife, “don’t be such a pulamiter!”
“ ’Strewth!” he said. “Tha’s niver knowed me but what I looked as if I wor goin’ off in a rapid decline.”
She sat and laughed.
“You’ve had a constitution like iron,” she said; “and never a man had a better start, if it was body that counted. You should have seen him as a young man,” she cried suddenly to Paul, drawing herself up to imitate her husband’s once handsome bearing.
Morel watched her shyly. He saw again the passion she had had for him. It blazed upon her for a moment. He was shy, rather scared, and humble. Yet again he felt his old glow. And then immediately he felt the ruin he had made during these years. He wanted to bustle about, to run away from it.
“Gi’e my back a bit of a wesh,” he asked her.
His wife brought a well-soaped flannel and clapped it on his shoulders. He gave a jump.
