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.
Chapter 10
Connie was a good deal alone now, fewer people came to Wragby. Clifford
no longer wanted them. He had turned against even the cronies. He was queer.
He preferred the radio, which he had installed at some expense, with a good
deal of success at last. He could sometimes get Madrid or Frankfurt, even
there in the uneasy Midlands.
And he would sit alone for hours listening to the loudspeaker bellowing
forth. It amazed and stunned Connie. But there he would sit, with a blank
entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen,
or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing.
Was he really listening? Or was it a sort of soporific he took, whilst
something else worked on underneath in him? Connie did now know. She fled up
to her room, or out of doors to the wood. A kind of terror filled her
sometimes, a terror of the incipient insanity of the whole civilized
species.
But now that Clifford was drifting off to this other weirdness of
industrial activity, becoming almost a creature, with a hard, efficient
shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior, one of the amazing crabs and
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