Connie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford.
What is more, she felt she had always really disliked him. Not hate:
there was no passion in it. But a profound physical dislike. Almost,
it seemed to her, she had married him because she disliked him, in a
secret, physical sort of way. But of course, she had married him really
because in a mental way he attracted her and excited her. He had seemed,
in some way, her master, beyond her.

Now the mental excitement had worn itself out and collapsed, and she
was aware only of the physical aversion. It rose up in her from her
depths: and she realized how it had been eating her life away.

She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come
from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was
terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and
so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The
individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two
modes: money and love. Look at Michaelis! His life and activity were
just insanity. His love was a sort of insanity.

And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild
struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was
getting worse, really maniacal.

Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting
his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane
people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware
of the great desert tracts in his consciousness.

Mrs Bolton was admirable in many ways. But she had that queer sort
of bossiness, endless assertion of her own will, which is one of the
signs of insanity in modern woman. She thought she was utterly subservient
and living for others. Clifford fascinated her because he always, or
so of ten, frustrated her will, as if by a finer instinct. He had a
finer, subtler will of self-assertion than herself. This was his charm
for her.

Perhaps that had been his charm, too, for Connie.

`It's a lovely day, today!' Mrs Bolton would say in her caressive,
persuasive voice. `I should think you'd enjoy a little run in your chair
today, the sun's just lovely.'

`Yes? Will you give me that book---there, that yellow one. And I think
I'll have those hyacinths taken out.'

`Why they're so beautiful!' She pronounced it with the `y' sound: be-yutiful!
`And the scent is simply gorgeous.'

`The scent is what I object to,' he said. `It's a little funereal.'

`Do you think so!' she exclaimed in surprise, just a little offended,
but impressed. And she carried the hyacinths out of the room, impressed
by his higher fastidiousness.

`Shall I shave you this morning, or would you rather do it yourself?'
Always the same soft, caressive, subservient, yet managing voice.

`I don't know. Do you mind waiting a while. I'll ring when I'm ready.'

`Very good, Sir Clifford!' she replied, so soft and submissive, withdrawing
quietly. But every rebuff stored up new energy of will in her.

When he rang, after a time, she would appear at once. And then he would
say:

`I think I'd rather you shaved me this morning.'

Her heart gave a little thrill, and she replied with extra softness:

`Very good, Sir Clifford!'

She was very deft, with a soft, lingering touch, a little slow. At
first he had resented the infinitely soft touch of her lingers on his
face. But now he liked it, with a growing voluptuousness. He let her
shave him nearly every day: her face near his, her eyes so very concentrated,
watching that she did it right. And gradually her fingertips knew his
cheeks and lips, his jaw and chin and throat perfectly. He was well-fed
and well-liking, his face and throat were handsome enough and he was
a gentleman.

She was handsome too, pale, her face rather long and absolutely still,
her eyes bright, but revealing nothing. Gradually, with infinite softness,
almost with love, she was getting him by the throat, and he was yielding
to her.

She now did almost everything for him, and he felt more at home with
her, less ashamed of accepting her menial offices, than with Connie.
She liked handling him. She loved having his body in her charge, absolutely,
to the last menial offices. She said to Connie one day: `All men are
babies, when you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've handled some
of the toughest customers as ever went down Tevershall pit. But let
anything ail them so that you have to do for them, and they're babies,
just big babies. Oh, there's not much difference in men!'

At first Mrs Bolton had thought there really was something different
in a gentleman, a real gentleman, like Sir Clifford. So Clifford had
got a good start of her. But gradually, as she came to the bottom of
him, to use her own term, she found he was like the rest, a baby grown
to man's proportions: but a baby with a queer temper and a fine manner
and power in its control, and all sorts of odd knowledge that she had
never dreamed of, with which he could still bully her.

Connie was sometimes tempted to say to him:

`For God's sake, don't sink so horribly into the hands of that woman!'
But she found she didn't care for him enough to say it, in the long
run.

It was still their habit to spend the evening together, till ten o'clock.
Then they would talk, or read together, or go over his manuscript. But
the thrill had gone out of it. She was bored by his manuscripts. But
she still dutifully typed them out for him. But in time Mrs Bolton would
do even that.

For Connie had suggested to Mrs Bolton that she should learn to use
a typewriter. And Mrs Bolton, always ready, had begun at once, and practised
assiduously. So now Clifford would sometimes dictate a letter to her,
and she would take it down rather slowly, but correctly. And he was
very patient, spelling for her the difficult words, or the occasional
phrases in French. She was so thrilled, it was almost a pleasure to
instruct her.

Now Connie would sometimes plead a headache as an excuse for going
up to her room after dinner.

`Perhaps Mrs Bolton will play piquet with you,' she said to Clifford.

`Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. You go to your own room and rest,
darling.'

But no sooner had she gone, than he rang for Mrs Bolton, and asked
her to take a hand at piquet or bezique, or even chess. He had taught
her all these games. And Connie found it curiously objectionable to
see Mrs Bolton, flushed and tremulous like a little girl, touching her
queen or her knight with uncertain fingers, then drawing away again.
And Clifford, faintly smiling with a half-teasing superiority, saying
to her:

`You must say j'adoube!'

She looked up at him with bright, startled eyes, then murmured shyly,
obediently:

`J'adoube!'

Yes, he was educating her. And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of
power. And she was thrilled. She was coming bit by bit into possession
of all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from
the money. That thrilled her. And at the same time, she was making him
want to have her there with him. It was a subtle deep flattery to him,
her genuine thrill.

To Connie, Clifford seemed to be coming out in his true colours: a
little vulgar, a little common, and uninspired; rather fat. Ivy Bolton's
tricks and humble bossiness were also only too transparent. But Connie
did wonder at the genuine thrill which the woman got out of Clifford.
To say she was in love with him would be putting it wrongly. She was
thrilled by her contact with a man of the upper class, this titled gentleman,
this author who could write books and poems, and whose photograph appeared
in the illustrated newspapers. She was thrilled to a weird passion.
And his `educating' her roused in her a passion of excitement and response
much deeper than any love affair could have done. In truth, the very
fact that there could be no love affair left her free to thrill to her
very marrow with this other passion, the peculiar passion of knowing,
knowing as he knew.

There was no mistake that the woman was in some way in love with him:
whatever force we give to the word love. She looked so handsome and
so young, and her grey eyes were sometimes marvellous. At the same time,
there was a lurking soft satisfaction about her, even of triumph, and
private satisfaction. Ugh, that private satisfaction. How Connie loathed
it!

But no wonder Clifford was caught by the woman! She absolutely adored
him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself absolutely at his service,
for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!

Connie heard long conversations going on between the two. Or rather,
it bas mostly Mrs Bolton talking. She had unloosed to him the stream
of gossip about Tevershall village. It was more than gossip. It was
Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one, with
a great deal more, that these women left out.' Once started, Mrs Bolton
was better than any book, about the lives of the people. She knew them
all so intimately, and had such a peculiar, flamey zest in all their
affairs, it was wonderful, if just a trifle humiliating to listen to
her. At first she had not ventured to `talk Tevershall', as she called
it, to Clifford. But once started, it went on. Clifford was listening
for `material', and he found it in plenty. Connie realized that his
so-called genius was just this: a perspicuous talent for personal gossip,
clever and apparently detached. Mrs Bolton, of course, was very warm
when she `talked Tevershall'. Carried away, in fact. And it was marvellous,
the things that happened and that she knew about. She would have run
to dozens of volumes.

Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little
ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After
all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only
in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any
human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For
even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows
and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast
importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into
new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead
our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel,
properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it
is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide
of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and
recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify
the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally `pure'.
Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip,
all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of
the angels. Mrs Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels.
`And he was such a bad fellow, and she was such a nice woman.' Whereas,
as Connie could see even from Mrs Bolton's gossip, the woman had been
merely a mealy-mouthed sort, and the man angrily honest. But angry honesty
made a `bad man' of him, and mealy-mouthedness made a `nice woman' of
her, in the vicious, conventional channelling of sympathy by Mrs Bolton.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason,
most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public
responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Nevertheless, one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs Bolton's
talk. A terrible, seething welter of ugly life it seemed: not at all
the flat drabness it looked from outside. Clifford of course knew by
sight most of the people mentioned, Connie knew only one or two. But
it sounded really more like a Central African jungle than an English
village.

`I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you
ever! Miss Allsopp, old James' daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp.
You know they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year
from a fall; eighty-three, he was, an' nimble as a lad. An' then he
slipped on Bestwood Hill, on a slide as the lads 'ad made last winter,
an' broke his thigh, and that finished him, poor old man, it did seem
a shame. Well, he left all his money to Tattie: didn't leave the boys
a penny. An' Tattie, I know, is five years---yes, she's fifty-three
last autumn. And you know they were such Chapel people, my word! She
taught Sunday school for thirty years, till her father died. And then
she started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I don't know if
you know him, an oldish fellow with a red nose, rather dandified, Willcock,
as works in Harrison's woodyard. Well he's sixty-five, if he's a day,
yet you'd have thought they were a pair of young turtle-doves, to see
them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an' she sitting on his
knee right in the bay window on Pye Croft Road, for anybody to see.
And he's got sons over forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If old
James Allsopp hasn't risen from his grave, it's because there is no
rising: for he kept her that strict! Now they're married and gone to
live down at Kinbrook, and they say she goes round in a dressing-gown
from morning to night, a veritable sight. I'm sure it's awful, the way
the old ones go on! Why they're a lot worse than the young, and a sight
more disgusting. I lay it down to the pictures, myself. But you can't
keep them away. I was always saying: go to a good instructive film,
but do for goodness sake keep away from these melodramas and love films.
Anyhow keep the children away! But there you are, grown-ups are worse
than the children: and the old ones beat the band. Talk about morality!
Nobody cares a thing. Folks does as they like, and much better off they
are for it, I must say. But they're having to draw their horns in nowadays,
now th' pits are working so bad, and they haven't got the money. And
the grumbling they do, it's awful, especially the women. The men are
so good and patient! What can they do, poor chaps! But the women, oh,
they do carry on! They go and show off, giving contributions for a wedding
present for Princess Mary, and then when they see all the grand things
that's been given, they simply rave: who's she, any better than anybody
else! Why doesn't Swan & Edgar give me one fur coat, instead of
giving her six. I wish I'd kept my ten shillings! What's she going to
give me, I should like to know? Here I can't get a new spring coat,
my dad's working that bad, and she gets van-loads. It's time as poor
folks had some money to spend, rich ones 'as 'ad it long enough. I want
a new spring coat, I do, an' wheer am I going to get it? I say to them,
be thankful you're well fed and well clothed, without all the new finery
you want! And they fly back at me: "Why isn't Princess Mary thankful
to go about in her old rags, then, an' have nothing! Folks like her
get van-loads, an' I can't have a new spring coat. It's a damned shame.
Princess! Bloomin' rot about Princess! It's munney as matters, an' cos
she's got lots, they give her more! Nobody's givin' me any, an' I've
as much right as anybody else. Don't talk to me about education. It's
munney as matters. I want a new spring coat, I do, an' I shan't get
it, cos there's no munney..." That's all they care about, clothes.
They think nothing of giving seven or eight guineas for a winter coat---colliers'
daughters, mind you---and two guineas for a child's summer hat. And
then they go to the Primitive Chapel in their two-guinea hat, girls
as would have been proud of a three-and-sixpenny one in my day. I heard
that at the Primitive Methodist anniversary this year, when they have
a built-up platform for the Sunday School children, like a grandstand
going almost up to th' ceiling, I heard Miss Thompson, who has the first
class of girls in the Sunday School, say there'd be over a thousand
pounds in new Sunday clothes sitting on that platform! And times are
what they are! But you can't stop them. They're mad for clothes. And
boys the same. The lads spend every penny on themselves, clothes, smoking,
drinking in the Miners' Welfare, jaunting off to Sheffield two or three
times a week. Why, it's another world. And they fear nothing, and they
respect nothing, the young don't. The older men are that patient and
good, really, they let the women take everything. And this is what it
leads to. The women are positive demons. But the lads aren't like their
dads. They're sacrificing nothing, they aren't: they're all for self.
If you tell them they ought to be putting a bit by, for a home, they
say: That'll keep, that will, I'm goin' t' enjoy myself while I can.
Owt else'll keep! Oh, they're rough an' selfish, if you like. Everything
falls on the older men, an' it's a bad outlook all round.'

Clifford began to get a new idea of his own village. The place had
always frightened him, but he had thought it more or less stable. Now---?

`Is there much Socialism, Bolshevism, among the people?' he asked.

`Oh!' said Mrs Bolton, `you hear a few loud-mouthed ones. But they're
mostly women who've got into debt. The men take no notice. I don't believe
you'll ever turn our Tevershall men into reds. They're too decent for
that. But the young ones blether sometimes. Not that they care for it
really. They only want a bit of money in their pocket, to spend at the
Welfare, or go gadding to Sheffield. That's all they care. When they've
got no money, they'll listen to the reds spouting. But nobody believes
in it, really.'

`So you think there's no danger?'

`Oh no! Not if trade was good, there wouldn't be. But if things were
bad for a long spell, the young ones might go funny. I tell you, they're
a selfish, spoilt lot. But I don't see how they'd ever do anything.
They aren't ever serious about anything, except showing off on motor-bikes
and dancing at the Palais-de-danse in Sheffield. You can't make them
serious. The serious ones dress up in evening clothes and go off to
the Pally to show off before a lot of girls and dance these new Charlestons
and what not. I'm sure sometimes the bus'll be full of young fellows
in evening suits, collier lads, off to the Pally: let alone those that
have gone with their girls in motors or on motor-bikes. They don't give
a serious thought to a thing---save Doncaster races, and the Derby:
for they all of them bet on every race. And football! But even football's
not what it was, not by a long chalk. It's too much like hard work,
they say. No, they'd rather be off on motor-bikes to Sheffield or Nottingham,
Saturday afternoons.'

`But what do they do when they get there?'

`Oh, hang around---and have tea in some fine tea-place like the Mikado---and
go to the Pally or the pictures or the Empire, with some girl. The girls
are as free as the lads. They do just what they like.'

`And what do they do when they haven't the money for these things?'

`They seem to get it, somehow. And they begin talking nasty then. But
I don't see how you're going to get bolshevism, when all the lads want
is just money to enjoy themselves, and the girls the same, with fine
clothes: and they don't care about another thing. They haven't the brains
to be socialists. They haven't enough seriousness to take anything really
serious, and they never will have.'

Connie thought, how extremely like all the rest of the classes the
lower classes sounded. Just the same thing over again, Tevershall or
Mayfair or Kensington. There was only one class nowadays: moneyboys.
The moneyboy and the moneygirl, the only difference was how much you'd
got, and how much you wanted.

Under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford began to take a new interest
in the mines. He began to feel he belonged. A new sort of self-assertion
came into him. After all, he was the real boss in Tevershall, he was
really the pits. It was a new sense of power, something he had till
now shrunk from with dread.

Tevershall pits were running thin. There were only two collieries:
Tevershall itself, and New London. Tevershall had once been a famous
mine, and had made famous money. But its best days were over. New London
was never very rich, and in ordinary times just got along decently.
But now times were bad, and it was pits like New London that got left.

`There's a lot of Tevershall men left and gone to Stacks Gate and Whiteover,'
said Mrs Bolton. `You've not seen the new works at Stacks Gate, opened
after the war, have you, Sir Clifford? Oh, you must go one day, they're
something quite new: great big chemical works at the pit-head, doesn't
look a bit like a colliery. They say they get more money out of the
chemical by-products than out of the coal---I forget what it is. And
the grand new houses for the men, fair mansions! of course it's brought
a lot of riff-raff from all over the country. But a lot of Tevershall
men got on there, and doin' well, a lot better than our own men. They
say Tevershall's done, finished: only a question of a few more years,
and it'll have to shut down. And New London'll go first. My word, won't
it be funny when there's no Tevershall pit working. It's bad enough
during a strike, but my word, if it closes for good, it'll be like the
end of the world. Even when I was a girl it was the best pit in the
country, and a man counted himself lucky if he could on here. Oh, there's
been some money made in Tevershall. And now the men say it's a sinking
ship, and it's time they all got out. Doesn't it sound awful! But of
course there's a lot as'll never go till they have to. They don't like
these new fangled mines, such a depth, and all machinery to work them.
Some of them simply dreads those iron men, as they call them, those
machines for hewing the coal, where men always did it before. And they
say it's wasteful as well. But what goes in waste is saved in wages,
and a lot more. It seems soon there'll be no use for men on the face
of the earth, it'll be all machines. But they say that's what folks
said when they had to give up the old stocking frames. I can remember
one or two. But my word, the more machines, the more people, that's
what it looks like! They say you can't get the same chemicals out of
Tevershall coal as you can out of Stacks Gate, and that's funny, they're
not three miles apart. But they say so. But everybody says it's a shame
something can't be started, to keep the men going a bit better, and
employ the girls. All the girls traipsing off to Sheffield every day!
My word, it would be something to talk about if Tevershall Collieries
took a new lease of life, after everybody saying they're finished, and
a sinking ship, and the men ought to leave them like rats leave a sinking
ship. But folks talk so much, of course there was a boom during the
war. When Sir Geoffrey made a trust of himself and got the money safe
for ever, somehow. So they say! But they say even the masters and the
owners don't get much out of it now. You can hardly believe it, can
you! Why I always thought the pits would go on for ever and ever. Who'd
have thought, when I was a girl! But New England's shut down, so is
Colwick Wood: yes, it's fair haunting to go through that coppy and see
Colwick Wood standing there deserted among the trees, and bushes growing
up all over the pit-head, and the lines red rusty. It's like death itself,
a dead colliery. Why, whatever should we do if Tevershall shut down---?
It doesn't bear thinking of. Always that throng it's been, except at
strikes, and even then the fan-wheels didn't stand, except when they
fetched the ponies up. I'm sure it's a funny world, you don't know where
you are from year to year, you really don't.'

It was Mrs Bolton's talk that really put a new fight into Clifford.
His income, as she pointed out to him, was secure, from his father's
trust, even though it was not large. The pits did not really concern
him. It was the other world he wanted to capture, the world of literature
and fame; the popular world, not the working world.

Now he realized the distinction between popular success and working
success: the populace of pleasure and the populace of work. He, as a
private individual, had been catering with his stories for the populace
of pleasure. And he had caught on. But beneath the populace of pleasure
lay the populace of work, grim, grimy, and rather terrible. They too
had to have their providers. And it was a much grimmer business, providing
for the populace of work, than for the populace of pleasure. While he
was doing his stories, and `getting on' in the world, Tevershall was
going to the wall.

He realized now that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main appetites:
one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and
artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite for meat and bones.
And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men
who made money in industry.

Yes, there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the bitch-goddess:
the group of the flatterers, those who offered her amusement, stories,
films, plays: and the other, much less showy, much more savage breed,
those who gave her meat, the real substance of money. The well-groomed
showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled among themselves for the
favours of the bitch-goddess. But it was nothing to the silent fight-to-the-death
that went on among the indispensables, the bone-bringers.

But under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford was tempted to enter this
other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial
production. Somehow, he got his pecker up.

In one way, Mrs Bolton made a man of him, as Connie never did. Connie
kept him apart, and made him sensitive and conscious of himself and
his own states. Mrs Bolton made hint aware only of outside things. Inwardly
he began to go soft as pulp. But outwardly he began to be effective.

He even roused himself to go to the mines once more: and when he was
there, he went down in a tub, and in a tub he was hauled out into the
workings. Things he had learned before the war, and seemed utterly to
have forgotten, now came back to him. He sat there, crippled, in a tub,
with the underground manager showing him the seam with a powerful torch.
And he said little. But his mind began to work.

He began to read again his technical works on the coal-mining industry,
he studied the government reports, and he read with care the latest
things on mining and the chemistry of coal and of shale which were written
in German. Of course the most valuable discoveries were kept secret
as far as possible. But once you started a sort of research in the field
of coal-mining, a study of methods and means, a study of by-products
and the chemical possibilities of coal, it was astounding the ingenuity
and the almost uncanny cleverness of the modern technical mind, as if
really the devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the technical scientists
of industry. It was far more interesting than art, than literature,
poor emotional half-witted stuff, was this technical science of industry.
In this field, men were like gods, or demons, inspired to discoveries,
and fighting to carry them out. In this activity, men were beyond atty
mental age calculable. But Clifford knew that when it did come to the
emotional and human life, these self-made men were of a mental age of
about thirteen, feeble boys. The discrepancy was enormous and appalling.

But let that be. Let man slide down to general idiocy in the emotional
and `human' mind, Clifford did not care. Let all that go hang. He was
interested in the technicalities of modern coal-mining, and in pulling
Tevershall out of the hole.

He went down to the pit day after day, he studied, he put the general
manager, and the overhead manager, and the underground manager, and
the engineers through a mill they had never dreamed of. Power! He felt
a new sense of power flowing through him: power over all these men,
over the hundreds and hundreds of colliers. He was finding out: and
he was getting things into his grip.

And he seemed verily to be re-born. Now life came into him! He had
been gradually dying, with Connie, in the isolated private life of the
artist and the conscious being. Now let all that go. Let it sleep. He
simply felt life rush into him out of the coal, out of the pit. The
very stale air of the colliery was better than oxygen to him. It gave
him a sense of power, power. He was doing something: and he was going
to do something. He was going to win, to win: not as he had won with
his stories, mere publicity, amid a whole sapping of energy and malice.
But a man's victory.

At first he thought the solution lay in electricity: convert the coal
into electric power. Then a new idea came. The Germans invented a new
locomotive engine with a self feeder, that did not need a fireman. And
it was to be fed with a new fuel, that burnt in small quantities at
a great heat, under peculiar conditions.

The idea of a new concentrated fuel that burnt with a hard slowness
at a fierce heat was what first attracted Clifford. There must be some
sort of external stimulus of the burning of such fuel, not merely air
supply. He began to experiment, and got a clever young fellow, who had
proved brilliant in chemistry, to help him.

And he felt triumphant. He had at last got out of himself. He had fulfilled
his life-long secret yearning to get out of himself. Art had not done
it for him. Art had only made it worse. But now, now he had done it.

He was not aware how much Mrs Bolton was behind him. He did not know
how much he depended on her. But for all that, it was evident that when
he was with her his voice dropped to an easy rhythm of intimacy, almost
a trifle vulgar.

With Connie, he was a little stiff. He felt he owed her everything,
and he showed her the utmost respect and consideration, so long as she
gave him mere outward respect. But it was obvious he had a secret dread
of her. The new Achilles in hint had a heel, and in this heel the woman,
the woman like Connie, his wife, could lame him fatally. He went in
a certain half-subservient dread of her, and was extremely nice to her.
But his voice was a little tense when he spoke to her, and he began
to be silent whenever she was present.

Only when he was alone with Mrs Bolton did he really feel a lord and
a master, and his voice ran on with her almost as easily and garrulously
as her own could run. And he let her shave him or sponge all his body
as if he were a child, really as if he were a child.