Luck
As the story begins, luck seems to be simply be a matter of chance, and perhaps more specifically chance which has to do with material and superficial conditions. The first explicit discussion between the characters on luck comes when Paul asks his mother about money and, tellingly, conflates the word "lucre," which means money, with "luck." However, the further Paul asks his mother about luck, the more it becomes apparent that luck is something much more; and at the end of their conversation it is something which Paul must prove to his mother, since she does not believe him. When Paul rides his horse, he speaks of luck as a place which he needs to get to.
Love
One could say justifiably that this story is about love, the inability of love, or how love comes too late. The story begins with the impossibility of love, specifically of Paul's mother loving her children, due to her self-centeredness. In contrast, Paul intensely desires to get his mother's attention by proving that he is lucky, which is to say that he desires her love. His success and luck in gambling seem to only drive her further into selfish desire, but it turns out that the self-destructive aspect of his obsession begins to catch her attention. However, it is not until it this obsession has consumed Paul that his mother makes her first real move of concern and love towards him.
Inner versus Outer
From the very first paragraph of the story, outer appearances are placed in contrast to inner realities. Moreover, although it is assumed that to other people the hidden tensions between the two levels may not be apparent, Lawrence describes all the characters within Paul's family as having a sort of unspoken awareness of what is going on within each other. Although the parents do not seem to complain explicitly about not having enough money, their anxieties come across very clearly and powerfully to their children in the form of the whispering of the house. Paul's mother, in particular, is not very forthright with her feelings, preferring to keep them bottled up within herself, such as when she does not directly speak of her dissatisfaction with the gift Paul secretly gave her but just says that it was "Quite moderately nice."
Desire
The driving force of the story is desire: desire for money, luck, love, recognition, expression. In other words, there is always something lacking which ends up producing strong, though not always recognized, emotions. Paul's mother desires more money but never speaks so explicitly about this desire; the house does it for her. Likewise Paul desires his mother's love and recognition. Every desire poses itself as an image of fulfillment, especially for Paul, who imagines a "there" which he can "get" to. However, the fulfillment of this desire - his greatest gambling win and his winning his mother's love - ends up consuming him so entirely that he dies.
Silence
The reaction of almost all the characters towards the tensions between inner and outer in the story is, for the most part, to remain silent. Uncle Oscar takes interest in Paul for his precocity in predicting races, but never tries to figure out how it is that Paul gains his insight; or if he does know, then he says and does nothing about it, despite the destructive path it leads Paul to take. Ironically, this silence makes problems and anxieties even more clear and compelling to everyone in the family. What the characters do not say, the house whispers or shouts to them obsessively, so that they can never escape their problems and anxieties.
Secrets
Although some inner anxieties, which are left unspoken by the characters, end up being articulated by other forces such as the whispering of the house, there are also certain emotional realities which remain unnoticed or only sensed in the dimmest of ways. For the reader and Paul's mother, it is not until the end that we "catch" Paul in the middle of one of his rides; though we may have seen him "urging" his horse on early in the story, the connection among Paul's gambling insight, his madness, and the rocking-horse is not clearly established until the final revelatory scene. Before then, Paul is anxious to keep what he is doing a secret from everyone, even his gambling partners.
Growing Up
In the beginning of the story, Paul is, along with his sisters, still under the care of their nurse. However, by the end, he is beyond everyone in his family, even his mother, who at last wants to love him. For Paul, it is not so much the school that he ends up being able to attend or the tutors whom he works with, but his desperate and obsessive riding of his horse in order to gain gambling insight which at once releases him from the bonds of childhood while at the same time prevents him from developing in a healthy manner. He ends up a kind of exaggerated child, possessing extreme childlike passions and fascinations, without cuteness and pliability.
