unlike a working-man anyhow; although he had something in common with the
local people. But also something very uncommon.
`The game-keeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person,' she said to
Clifford; `he might almost be a gentleman.'
`Might he?' said Clifford. `I hadn't noticed.'
`But isn't there something special about him?' Connie insisted.
`I think he's quite a nice fellow, but I know very little about him. He
only came out of the army last year, less than a year ago. From India, I
rather think. He may have picked up certain tricks out there, perhaps he was
an officer's servant, and improved on his position. Some of the men were
like that. But it does them no good, they have to fall back into their old
places when they get home again.'
Connie gazed at Clifford contemplatively. She saw in him the peculiar
tight rebuff against anyone of the lower classes who might be really
climbing up, which she knew was characteristic of his breed.
`But don't you think there is something special about him?' she asked.
`Frankly, no! Nothing I had noticed.'
He looked at her curiously, uneasily, half-suspiciously. And she felt
he wasn't telling her the real truth; he wasn't telling himself the real
truth, that was it. He disliked any suggestion of a really exceptional human
being. People must be more or less at his level, or below it.
Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her
generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!
Chapter 7
When Connie went up to her bedroom she did what she had not done for a
long time: took off all her clothes, and looked at herself naked in the huge
mirror. She did not know what she was looking for, or at, very definitely,
yet she moved the lamp till it shone full on her.
And she thought, as she had thought so often, what a frail, easily
hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little
unfinished, incomplete!
She had been supposed to have rather a good figure, but now she was out
of fashion: a little too female, not enough like an adolescent boy. She was
not very tall, a bit Scottish and short; but she had a certain fluent,
down-slipping grace that might have been beauty. Her skin was faintly tawny,
her limbs had a certain stillness, her body should have had a full,
down-slipping richness; but it lacked something.
Instead of ripening its firm, down-running curves, her body was
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