I was moved to tease her a little.  “There’s jewels, you know, walls and gates of jewels—­and singing.”

“For such as like them,” said my mother firmly, and thought for a while.  “There’ll be things for all of us, o’ course.  But for me it couldn’t be Heaven, dear, unless it was a garden—­a nice sunny garden. . . .  And feeling such as we’re fond of, are close and handy by”

You of your happier generation cannot realize the wonderfulness of those early days in the new epoch, the sense of security, the extraordinary effects of contrast.  In the morning, except in high summer, I was up before dawn, and breakfasted upon the swift, smooth train, and perhaps saw the sunrise as I rushed out of the little tunnel that pierced Clayton Crest, and so to work like a man.  Now that we had got all the homes and schools and all the softness of life away from our coal and iron ore and clay, now that a thousand obstructive “rights” and timidities had been swept aside, we could let ourselves go, we merged this enterprise with that, cut across this or that anciently obstructive piece of private land, joined and separated, effected gigantic consolidations and gigantic economies, and the valley, no longer a pit of squalid human tragedies and meanly conflicting industries, grew into a sort of beauty of its own, a savage inhuman beauty of force and machinery and flames.  One was a Titan in that Etna.  Then back one came at midday to bath and change in the train, and so to the leisurely gossiping lunch in the club dining-room in Lowchester House, and the refreshment of these green and sunlit afternoon tranquillities.

Sometimes in her profounder moments my mother doubted whether all this last phase of her life was not a dream.

“A dream,” I used to say, “a dream indeed—­but a dream that is one step nearer awakening than that nightmare of the former days.”

She found great comfort and assurance in my altered clothes—­she liked the new fashions of dress, she alleged.  It was not simply altered clothes.  I did grow two inches, broaden some inches round my chest, and increase in weight three stones before I was twenty-three.  I wore a soft brown cloth and she would caress my sleeve and admire it greatly—­she had the woman’s sense of texture very strong in her.

Sometimes she would muse upon the past, rubbing together her poor rough hands—­they never got softened—­one over the other.  She told me much I had not heard before about my father, and her own early life.  It was like finding flat and faded flowers in a book still faintly sweet, to realize that once my mother had been loved with passion; that my remote father had once shed hot tears of tenderness in her arms.  And she would sometimes even speak tentatively in those narrow, old-world phrases that her lips could rob of all their bitter narrowness, of Nettie.

“She wasn’t worthy of you, dear,” she would say abruptly, leaving me to guess the person she intended.