ping up and going straight out
of the house when his father disgusted him. And Morel persisted the more
because his children hated it. He seemed to take a kind of satisfaction
in disgusting them, and driving them nearly mad, while they were so
irritably sensitive at the age of fourteen or fifteen. So that Arthur,
who was growing up when his father was degenerate and elderly, hated him
worst of all.

Then, sometimes, the father would seem to feel the contemptuous hatred
of his children.

"There's not a man tries harder for his family!" he would shout. "He
does his best for them, and then gets treated like a dog. But I'm not
going to stand it, I tell you!"

But for the threat and the fact that he did not try so hard as he
imagined, they would have felt sorry. As it was, the battle now went on
nearly all between father and children, he persisting in his dirty and
disgusting ways, just to assert his independence. They loathed him.

Arthur was so inflamed and irritable at last, that when he won a
scholarship for the Grammar School in Nottingham, his mother decided
to let him live in town, with one of her sisters, and only come home at
week-ends.

Annie was still a junior teacher in the Board-school, earning about four
shillings a week. But soon she would have fifteen shillings, since she
had passed her examination, and there would be financial peace in the
house.

Mrs. Morel clung now to Paul. He was quiet and not brilliant. But still
he stuck to his painting, and still he stuck to his mother. Everything
he did was for her. She waited for his coming home in the evening, and
then she unburdened herself of all she had pondered, or of all that
had occurred to her during the day. He sat and listened with his
earnestness. The two shared lives.

William was engaged now to his brunette, and had bought her an
engagement ring that cost eight guineas. The children gasped at such a
fabulous price.

"Eight guineas!" said Morel. "More fool him! If he'd gen me some on't,
it 'ud ha' looked better on 'im."

"Given YOU some of it!" cried Mrs. Morel. "Why give YOU some of it!"

She remembered HE had bought no engagement ring at all, and she
preferred William, who was not mean, if he were foolish. But now the
young man talked only of the dances to which he went with his betrothed,
and the different resplendent clothes she wore; or he told his mother
with glee how they went to the theatre like great swells.

He wanted to bring th