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His relief, when he got outside, and was walking along the Mansfield Road, was infinite. On the park wall the mosses were green. There were some gold and some white fowls pecking under the apple trees of an orchard. The colliers were walking home in a stream. The boy went near the wall, self-consciously. He knew many of the men, but could not recognise them in their dirt.
"We used to go to school together, Geoff," the boy explained a little self-consciously, "she never kissed me before; she ain't the kissin' sort. I wonder why she did it to-night? I wonder " So saying, Spike turned and led the way on again until they reached the landing above, across which two doors, dark and unlovely, seemed to scowl upon each other.
Then he had been sent on by the strange force which lives and perpetually renews itself in a man's own genius, when he is at the work he was sent into the world to do. Now he had scourged himself on by a self-consciously exercised force of will. He had set his teeth. He had called upon all the dogged pertinacity which a man must have if he is to be really a man among men.
Perry surprised himself by the ease with which he made this monstrous threat, but it seemed to have a soporific influence on his companion, for he muttered an "aw gwan" and subsided into abashed silence. The ringmaster mounted to the top of the piano and waved his hand for silence. "Prizes!" he cried. "Gather round!" "Yea! Prizes!" Self-consciously the circle swayed forward.
Tall, quick in his movements, as if he found life a perpetual dance and self-consciously adapted himself to it, with mocking blue eyes, red hair and a long nose bent slightly to one side, he was, in every line and act, vulgar, and yet so arrogantly bent on pleasing that you unconsciously had to acknowledge his intention and refrain from turning your back on him.
"You seem to have a grudge against the cloth," Thompson hazarded a shrewd guess. "I wonder why?" "I'll tell you why," the girl said and she laughed a little self-consciously. "My reason tells me it's a silly way to feel. I can never quite consider theology and the preachers from the same dispassionate plane that dad can. There's a foolish sense of personal grievance.
She was not self-consciously thinking of her lovers, not congratulating herself on their acquirement, but the consciousness that she had achieved them lay graciously round her heart, gave the soft satisfaction to her musings that comes to one who has accomplished a duty. With all modesty she felt the gratification of the being who approaches his Destiny.
In the afternoon they went up to play football, but Mr. Watson stopped Philip on the way out after dinner. "I suppose you can't play football, Carey?" he asked him. Philip blushed self-consciously. "No, sir." "Very well. You'd better go up to the field. You can walk as far as that, can't you?" Philip had no idea where the field was, but he answered all the same. "Yes, sir."
But after this, with an abrupt shift to another plane, "That would be acting preposterously, like a silly, self-consciously virtuous matron. What earthly difference does it make to me what a casual visitor to our town says or does to amuse himself in his casual stay, that may end at any moment?
"Breakfast is ready," she added self-consciously, her girlish innocence startled like a fawn of the forest at the hunter's approach. For whereas she had been blind now she saw in part. Some flash of clairvoyance had laid bare a glimpse of his heart and her own to her. Without misunderstanding the perfect respect for her which he felt, she knew the turbid banked emotions which this dammed.
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