You can hardly believe it, can you! Why I always thought the Pits would go on forever and ever. Who’d have thought, when I was a girl! But New England’s shut down, so is Colwick Wood: yes, it’s fair haunting to go through that coppy and see Colwick Wood standing there deserted among the trees, and bushes growing up all over the pithead, and the lines red rusty. It’s like death itself, a dead colliery. Why whatever we should do if Tevershall shut down⁠—? it doesn’t bear thinking of. Always that throng it’s been, except at strikes, and even then the fanwheels didn’t stand, except when they fetched the ponies up. I’m sure it’s a funny world, you don’t know where you are from year to year, you really don’t.”

It was Mrs. Bolton’s talk that really put a new fight into Clifford. His income, as she pointed out to him, was secure, from his father’s trust, even though it was not large. The pits did not really concern him. It was the other world he wanted to capture, the world of literature and fame; the popular world, not the working world.