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Updated: May 4, 2025
The red or blue shirt, the nondescript hat, and the high, mud-caked boots of the miner preponderated. Here and there in the crowd, however, stood a man dressed in the height of fashion. There seemed no middle ground. These latter were either the professional gamblers, the lawyers, or the promoters. A trial was in progress, to which all paid deep attention.
This again was unlike the Ethel he knew, but sorrow has a refining effect on all characters. He entered the gate self-consciously. Ethel was at the front-door. She looked at his torn shirt and mud-caked knees. "You'd better hurry if you're going to be ready for lunch," she said coldly. "Lunch?" faltered William. "What time is it?" "Ten to one. Father's in, so I warn you," she added unpleasantly.
She had been in the stables only a few weeks before when he had handed over another jaded mud-caked brute trembling in every limb and showing signs of merciless riding to the old head groom who had maintained a stony silence as was his duty but whose grim face was eloquent of all he might not say.
She patted them down in front of all four wheels. Her crisp hands looked like the paws of a three-year-old boy making a mud fort. Her nails hurt from the mud wedged beneath them. Her mud-caked shoes were heavy to lift. It was with exquisite self-approval that she sat on the running-board, scraped a car-load of lignite off her soles, climbed back into the car, punched the starter.
When, as occasionally happened, there was a bit too much fervor when her hand was kissed, she laid it where it belonged to loneliness and the spring and became extremely maternal and very, very kind. Which both of them are death blows to young love. The winter floods were receding. Along the Yser Canal mud-caked flats began to appear, with here and there rusty tangles of barbed wire.
His wide, staring eyes and white face, and blood smeared from the trickling wound in his neck, his capless head and tumbled hair, his clay and mud-caked and blood-stained uniform all gave him a look of wildness, of desperation, of abandonment.
It is only necessary to say that we first lost our way and went ten or twelve kilometers in the wrong direction; then we had a blow-out and no quick-detachable rim; subsequently something went wrong with the mud-caked machinery and my unfortunate valet had to lie on his back in a puddle for half an hour; eventually we sneaked into the garage with our trembling Mercedes, and quarrelled manfully with the men who had to wash her.
Holding her skirts to her the new dress she had made with such pride, now damp, and crushed, and soiled she sat down and put her feet, in their soaked, mud-caked, little prunella boots, on the rung of her chair, for fear of other monsters that might be crawling the floor.
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