Lady Chatterley’s Lover quotes

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.

The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.

We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

This was more or less Constance Chatterley’s position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she had realised that one must live and learn.

… about in a wheeled chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the fine melancholy park, of which he was really so proud, though he pretended to be flippant about it.

Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him.

He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one might say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his hands were very strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties from Bond Street.

Fathers were ridiculous: his own obstinate one supremely so. And governments were ridiculous: our own wait-and-see sort especially so. And armies were ridiculous, and old duffers of generals altogether, the red-faced Kitchener supremely.

Even the war was ridiculous, though it did kill rather a lot of people.

In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous: certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in the army or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a degree.

So cut off he was, so divorced from the England that was really England, so utterly incapable, that he even thought well of Horatio Bottomley.

Sir Geoffrey stood for England and Lloyd George as his forebears had stood for England and St. George: and he never knew there was a difference.

So Sir Geoffrey felled timber and stood for Lloyd George and England, England and Lloyd George.

But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no child.

And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin.

And when the wind was that way, which was often, the house was full of the stench of this sulphureous combustion of the earth’s excrement. But even on windless days the air always smelt of something under-earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid.

And even on the Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna from skies of doom.

Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful, but why kick? You couldn’t kick it away. It just went on. Life, like all the rest!

Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful, but why kick? You couldn’t kick it away. It just went on. Life, like all the rest!

On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches burned and quavered, dappling and swelling and contracting, like burns that give pain.

It was the furnaces. At first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror; she felt she was living underground. Then she got used to them. And in the morning it rained.

Connie and he were attached to one another, in the aloof modern way. He was much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his maiming, to be easy and flippant.

He was a hurt thing. And as such Connie stuck to him passionately.

But she could not help feeling how little connection he really had with people. The miners were, in a sense, his own men;

He was at once too intimate with her and not intimate enough. He was so very much at one with her, in his mind and hers, but bodily they were nonexistent to one another, and neither could bear to drag in the corpus delicti.

They were so intimate, and utterly out of touch.

Connie guessed, however, that her father had said something, and that something was in Clifford’s mind. She knew that he didn’t mind whether she were demi-vierge or demi-monde, so long as he didn’t absolutely know, and wasn’t made to see.

Connie guessed, however, that her father had said something, and that something was in Clifford’s mind. She knew that he didn’t mind whether she were demi-vierge or demi-monde, so long as he didn’t absolutely know, and wasn’t made to see.

What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.

Connie and Clifford had now been nearly two years at Wragby, living their vague life of absorption in Clifford and his work. Their interests had never ceased to flow together over his work.

Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because she was so beautifully out of contact. She and Clifford lived in their ideas and his books. She entertained … there were always people in the house.

Time went on as the clock does, half-past eight instead of half-past seven.

It was part of his very being that he must break off any connection, and be loose, isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was his major necessity, even though he always said: She turned me down!

The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience.

There’s lots of good fish in the sea … maybe … but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

these, and one or two others. That they never seemed to get anywhere didn’t trouble her deeply. She liked to hear what they had to say, especially when Tommy was there. It was fun.

Instead of men kissing you, and touching you with their bodies, they revealed their minds to you.

It was great fun! But what cold minds!

She was infinitely amused, and proud too, that even their talking they could not do without her silent presence. She had an immense respect for thought … and these men, at least, tried to think honestly.

But somehow there was a cat, and it wouldn’t jump.

They all alike talked at something, though what it was, for the life of her she couldn’t say. It was something that Mick didn’t clear, either.

Damned everybodies, as far as that goes, for they all do it. Else we bust apart, and cover up the spiteful things we feel against one another by saying false sugaries.

It’s a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite.

Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits. … Protagoras, or whoever it was!

“They aren’t, of course,” chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.

They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.

“I wasn’t talking about knowledge. … I was talking about the mental life,” laughed Dukes. “Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind.

“I wasn’t talking about knowledge. … I was talking about the mental life,” laughed Dukes. “

Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind.

The mind can only analyse and rationalise. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticise, and make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is vastly important.

“Me?

Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say ‘shit!’ in front of a lady.

”

There was Michaelis, whom she loved; so she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an excursion from her marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of intimacy, formed through years of suffering and patience.

Perhaps the human soul needs excursions, and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is that you come home again.

“And wouldn’t you mind what man’s child I had?” she asked.

She was silent.

Logic might be unanswerable because it was so absolutely wrong.

“And should you expect me to tell you?” she asked, glancing up at him almost furtively.

But she was. A strange, weary yearning, a dissatisfaction had started in her. Clifford did not notice: those were not things he was aware of. But the stranger knew.

To Connie, everything in her world and life seemed worn-out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the hills.

They came to the house, and round to the back, where there were no steps. Clifford managed to swing himself over on to the low, wheeled house-chair; he was very strong and agile with his arms.

Clifford’s mental life and hers gradually began to feel like nothingness. Their marriage, their integrated life based on a habit of intimacy, that he talked about: there were days when it all became utterly blank and nothing.

It was words, just so many words. The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.

There was Clifford’s success: the bitch-goddess! It was true he was almost famous, and his books brought him in a thousand pounds. His photograph appeared everywhere. There was a bust of him in one of the galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries.

“

No doubt water ought not to be so wet as it is; it overdoes it in wetness.

But there it is! I like women and talk to them, and therefore I don’t love them and desire them. The two things don’t happen at the same time in me.”

Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn, so forlorn and stray.

Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt.

What was the point, of her or anything?

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. “Home!” … it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled.

All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day.

Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn’t fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his …

You couldn’t spend your last sou, and say finally: So that’s that!—No, if you lived even another ten minutes, you wanted a few more sous for something or other. Just to keep the business mechanically going, you needed money. You had to have it.

Money you have to have. You needn’t really have anything else.

So that’s that!—

Love, sex, all that sort of stuff, just water-ices! Lick it up and forget it. If you don’t hang on to it in your mind, it’s nothing. Sex especially … nothing! Make up your mind to it, and you’ve solved the problem.

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.

But a child, a baby! that was still one of the sensations. She would venture very gingerly on that experiment. There was the man to consider, and it was curious, there wasn’t a man in the world whose children you wanted. Mick’s children! Repulsive thought!

it had hit her in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her.

Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone.

And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty, but a lambency, the warm, white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!

Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature.

Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty, but a lambency, the warm, white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!

Connie had received the shock of vision in her womb, and she knew it; it lay inside her. But with her mind she was inclined to ridicule. A man washing himself in a backyard! No doubt with evil-smelling yellow soap!—She was rather annoyed;

“Only combing my hair, if you don’t mind. I’m sorry I hadn’t a coat on, but then I had no idea who was knocking.

Nobody knocks here, and the unexpected sounds ominous.

”

And she felt he wasn’t telling her the real truth; he wasn’t telling himself the real truth, that was it. He disliked any suggestion of a really exceptional human being. People must be more or less at his level, or below it.

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!

Old through neglect and denial, yes denial. Fashionable women kept their bodies bright like delicate porcelain, by external attention. There was nothing inside the porcelain; but she was not even as bright as that.

The mental life! Suddenly she hated it with a rushing fury, the swindle!

She looked in the other mirror’s reflection at her back, her waist, her loins. She was getting thinner, but to her it was not becoming. The crumple of her waist at the back, as she bent back to look, was a little weary;

As between the two men, Michaelis really had far more use for her than Clifford had. He had even more need of her. Any good nurse can attend to crippled legs! And as for the heroic effort,

Michaelis was a heroic rat, and Clifford was very much of a poodle showing off.

There were people staying in the house, among them Clifford’s Aunt Eva, Lady Bennerley. She was a thin woman of sixty, with a red nose, a widow, and still something of a “grande dame.”

“Look here, my dear child,”—and Lady Bennerley laid her thin hand on Connie’s arm. “

A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

Believe me!” And she took another sip of brandy, which maybe was her form of repentance.

“Think so? Give me the resurrection of the body!” said Dukes. “But it’ll come, in time, when we’ve shoved the cerebral stone away a bit, the money and the rest.

Then we’ll get a democracy of touch, instead of a democracy of pocket.

”

And he soon became rather superb, somewhat lordly with the nurse. She had rather expected it, and he played up without knowing.

So susceptible we are to what is expected of us!

The colliers had been so like children, talking to her, and telling her what hurt them, while she bandaged them, or nursed them. They had always made her feel so grand, almost superhuman in her administrations.

“I don’t see a bit of connection with the actual violets,” she said. “

The Elizabethans are rather upholstered.

”

She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno’s eyelids, and windflowers were unravished brides.

How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out of living things.

The walk with Clifford was not quite a success. Between him and Connie there was a tension that each pretended not to notice, but there it was. Suddenly, with all the force of her female instinct, she was shoving him off.

the old russet of bracken almost vanished under green anemone ruffs. Perhaps this was one of the unravished places. Unravished! The whole world was ravished.

Some things can’t be ravished. You can’t ravish a tin of sardines.

And so many women are like that; and men. But the earth … !

Ravished!

How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.

A wet brown dog came running and did not bark, lifting a wet feather of a tail. The man followed in a wet black oilskin jacket, like a chauffeur, and face flushed a little.

She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible because it was insane.

Civilised society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first.

The individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love. Look at Michaelis! His life and activity were just insanity. His love was a sort of insanity.

She liked handling him. She loved having his body in her charge, absolutely, to the last menial offices. She said to Connie one day: “

All men are babies, when you come to the bottom of them.

Why, I’ve handled some of the toughest customers as ever went down Tevershall pit. But let anything ail them so that you have to do for them, and they’re babies, just big babies. Oh, there’s not much difference in men!”

After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy.

For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives.

And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead.

Connie thought, how extremely like all the rest of the classes the lower classes sounded. Just the same thing over again, Tevershall or Mayfair or Kensington. There was only one class nowadays: moneyboys.

The moneyboy and the moneygirl, the only difference was how much you’d got, and how much you wanted.

Under Mrs. Bolton’s influence, Clifford began to take a new interest in the mines. He began to feel he belonged. A new sort of self-assertion came into him. After all, he was the real boss in Tevershall, he was really the pits.

But under Mrs. Bolton’s influence, Clifford was tempted to enter this other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial production. Somehow, he got his pecker up.

In one way, Mrs. Bolton made a man of him, as Connie never did.

Connie kept him apart, and made him sensitive and conscious of himself and his own states. Mrs. Bolton made him aware only of outside things. Inwardly he began to go soft as pulp. But outwardly he began to be effective.

Connie heard it all with deepening dismay and repulsion.

It was one of the ghastly half-truths that poison human existence.

What man in his senses would say such things to a woman! But men aren’t in their senses. What man with a spark of honour would put this ghastly burden of life-responsibility upon a woman, and leave her there, in the void?

There was nothing between them. She never even touched him nowadays, and he never touched her. He never even took her hand and held it kindly. No, and because they were so utterly out of touch, he tortured her with his declaration of idolatry.

It was the cruelty of utter impotence.

And she felt her reason would give way, or she would die.

He kissed her softly, softly, with the kisses of warmth.

“If only there weren’t so many other people in the world,” he said lugubriously.

She laughed. They were at the gate to the park. He opened for her.

He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood. But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could no longer be private and withdrawn.

The world allows no hermits.

And now he had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom. For he knew by experience what it meant.

Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more.

All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron.

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing, she was nicer than she knew, and oh! so much too nice for the tough lot she was in contact with.

It was not woman’s fault, nor even love’s fault, nor the fault of sex.

The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines.

There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform.

To tell the truth, he was sorry for what had happened, perhaps most for her sake. He had a sense of foreboding. No sense of wrong or sin; he was troubled by no conscience in that respect.

He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself.

He was not afraid of himself. But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.

She waited patiently till she could go upstairs and think her own thoughts.

She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.

Once in her room, however, she felt still vague and confused. She didn’t know what to think. What sort of a man was he, really? Did he really like her? Not much, she felt. Yet he was kind.

But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her altogether.

Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley; but not to her womb they weren’t kind.

And he took no notice of Constance or of Lady Chatterley; he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts.

“Why should they know?” she said.

“Folks always does,” he said fatally.

Her lip quivered a little.

Till he’d gone and married that Bertha Coutts, as if to spite himself.

Some people do marry to spite themselves, because they’re disappointed of something.

And no wonder it had been a failure.—For years he was gone, all the time of the war: and a lieutenant and all: quite the gentleman, really quite the gentleman!—Then to come back to Tevershall and go as a gamekeeper!

it’s no good! It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times.

Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life.

And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.

And between, in between, were the tattered remnants of the old coaching and cottage England, even the England of Robin Hood, where the miners prowled with the dismalness of suppressed sporting instincts, when they were not at work.

England my England! but which is my England?

The stately homes of England make good photographs, and create the illusion of a connection with the Elizabethans. The handsome old halls are there, from the days of Good Queen Anne and Tom Jones.

This is history.

One England blots out another.

The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England.

Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had made a difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive!

What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them.

“Oh, she blushed! and looked quite beautiful for a moment, poor thing!

Why don’t men marry the women who would really adore them?

”

And he said nothing. But he wouldn’t let himself go, or he couldn’t. He didn’t want me to have any more children. I always blamed his mother, for letting him in th’ room. He’d no right t’ave been there.

Men makes so much more of things than they should, once they start brooding.

”

“But why are you in a bad temper?” she asked. “Do you mean you are always in a bad temper?”

“Pretty well,” he said, laughing. “I don’t quite digest my bile.”

“But what bile?” she said.

“You won’t forget me when I’m gone, will you?” she asked. Again he lifted his eyes and looked full at her.

“Forget?” he said. “You know nobody forgets. It’s not a question of memory.”

She wanted to say: “What then?” but she didn’t. Instead, she said in a mute kind of voice: “I told Clifford I might have a child.”

“Yes, they’ve sat themselves to skin and bone,” he said. “An’ now they’re not all that anxious to come out an’ feed.

There’s no self in a sitting hen; she’s all in the eggs or the chicks.

”

… the palpable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone.

She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.

Ah, too lovely, too lovely! In the ebbing she realised all the loveliness. Now all her body clung with tender love to the unknown man, and blinding to the wilting penis, as it so tenderly, frailly, unknowingly withdrew, after the fierce thrust of its potency.

Connie walked on in silence a few paces. Then she said, obstinately:

“It sounds like saying an egg may go as addled as it likes, so long as it keeps its shell on whole. But addled eggs do break of themselves.”

“I don’t think people are eggs,” he said. “Not even angels’ eggs, my dear little evangelist.”

When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people, Connie was frightened.

There was something devastatingly true in what he said. But it was a truth that killed.

Seeing her pale and silent, Clifford started the chair again, and no more was said till he halted again at the wood gate, which she opened.

“You are quite right about its being beautiful,” said Clifford. “It is so amazingly. What is quite so lovely as an English spring!”

Connie thought it sounded as if even the spring bloomed by act of Parliament.

An English spring! Why not an Irish one? or Jewish? The chair moved slowly ahead, past tufts of sturdy bluebells that stood up like wheat, and over grey burdock leaves.

She went up to her room, furious, saying to herself: “Him and buying people! Well, he doesn’t buy me, and therefore there’s no need for me to stay with him.

Dead fish of a gentleman, with his celluloid soul!

And how they take one in, with their manners and their mock wistfulness and gentleness. They’ve got about as much feeling as celluloid has.”

“Possibly! But he bores me: all that sophistication!

He doesn’t have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings.

I’m tired of self-important mentalities.”

“You see, I couldn’t fool myself. That’s where most men manage. They take an attitude, and accept a lie.

I could never fool myself. I knew what I wanted with a woman, and I could never say I’d got it when I hadn’t.

”

“Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warmhearted. I believe especially in being warmhearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warmheartedly, everything would come all right.

It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.

”

“

I don’t want to fuck you at all. My heart’s as cold as cold potatoes just now.

”

That’s what finishes me up. Kowtow, kowtow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet they’re always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs!

A generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each.

”

“Ay, it will. It’ll achieve its own salvation. When the last real man is killed, and they’re all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they’ll all be insane.

Because the root of sanity is in the balls.

Then they’ll all be insane, and they’ll make their grand auto da fé. You know auto da fé means act of faith? Ay well, they’ll make their own grand little act of faith. They’ll offer one another up.”

“Quite nice!

To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else.

And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct;

An’ the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the woman ’ud begin to be women.

It’s because th’ men aren’t men, that th’ women have to be.

—An’ in time pull down Tevershall and build a few beautiful buildings, that would hold us all. An’ clean the country up again. An’ not have many children, because the world is overcrowded.

An’ ivry bit of it is woman, woman sure as nuts. Tha’rt not one o’ them button-arsed lasses as should be lads, are ter! Tha’s got a real soft sloping bottom on thee, as a man loves in ’is guts.

It’s a bottom as could hold the world up, it is.

”

He reached to the table behind, and took up her bunch of flowers, still so wet that drops of rain fell on to her.

“Flowers stops out of doors all weathers,” he said. “They have no houses.”

“Not even a hut!” she murmured.

Connie listened, expecting more. But Clifford was waiting. She looked at him in surprise.

“And if it spiritually ascends,” she said, “what does it leave down below, in the place where its tail used to be?”

“Ah!” he said. “Take the man for what he means. Ascending is the opposite of his wasting, I presume.”

“Do you?

Then let it ascend, so long as it leaves me safely and solidly physically here below.

”

“Supreme pleasure?” she said, looking up at him. “Is that sort of idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the mind? No thank you!

Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life.

But so many people, like your famous wind-machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses.”

“And that’s better than the life of professional corpses. But it’s not true! The human body is only just coming to real life.

With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off.

But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb. And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body.”

“We’ve gone over all that. And as a matter of fact, I suppose your greatest thrill comes from being able to say a temporary farewell to all this.

Nothing so thrilling, for the moment, as Goodbye-to-it-all! But every parting means a meeting elsewhere. And every meeting is a new bondage.

”

“I’m not going to enter any new bondages.”

“Don’t boast, while the gods are listening,” he said.

“No! I won’t boast!” she said.

“Or never. Most women never care, never begin to. They don’t know what it means. Nor men either.

But when I see a woman as cares, my heart stands still for her.

”

“After all, Hilda,” she said, “love can be wonderful; when you feel you live, and are in the very middle of creation.” It was almost like bragging on her part.

“I suppose every mosquito feels the same,” said Hilda.

“Do you think it does? How nice for it!”

“All I mean,” she said from her entrenchment, “is that I doubt if you’ll find it’s been worth it, either of you!”

“One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” he said, out of the darkness. “But it’s meat an’ drink to me.”

“Don’t make me wait in the morning, Connie.”

And what is that to a woman? What is it, really, to the man either! He becomes merely messy and doggy, even in his mind. It needs sheer sensuality even to purify and quicken the mind. Sheer fiery sensuality, not messiness.

Ah God, how rare a thing a man is! They are all dogs that trot and sniff and copulate.

To have found a man who was not afraid and not ashamed! She looked at him now, sleeping so like a wild animal asleep, gone, gone in the remoteness of it. She nestled down, not to be away from him.

Just a man! And now becoming an old man, which is sad. Because in his strong, thick male legs there was none of the alert sensitiveness and power of tenderness which is the very essence of youth, that which never dies, once it is there.

Connie woke up to the existence of legs.

They became more important to her than faces, which are no longer very real. How few people had live, alert legs! She looked at the men in the stalls.

But the women were not daunted. The awful mill-posts of most females! really shocking, really enough to justify murder! Or the poor thin pegs! or the trim neat things in silk stockings, without the slightest look of life!

Awful, the millions of meaningless legs prancing meaninglessly around!

But she was not happy in London. The people seemed so spectral and blank. They had no alive happiness, no matter how brisk and good-looking they were. It was all barren. And Connie had a woman’s blind craving for happiness, to be assured of happiness.

No! said Connie to herself. I’d rather be at Wragby, where I can go about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of any sort.

This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly humiliating: it’s such a failure.

She wanted to go back to Wragby, even to Clifford, even to poor crippled Clifford. He wasn’t such a fool as this swarming holidaying lot, anyhow.

he took them to the theatre, to the Goldoni plays. There were illuminated water-fêtes, there were dances. This was a holiday-place of all holiday-places.

The Lido with its acres of sun-pinked or pyjamaed bodies, was like a strand with an endless heap of seals come up for mating.

Too many people in the piazza, too many limbs and trunks of humanity on the Lido, too many gondolas, too many motor-launches, too many steamers, too many pigeons, too many ices, too many cocktails, too many menservants wanting tips, too many languages rattling, too much, …

Connie pitied the wife of the easily-overflowing Giovanni. But Daniele’s wife would be one of those sweet Venetian women of the people whom one still sees, modest and flower-like in the back of that labyrinth of a town.

Ah, how sad that man first prostitutes woman, then woman prostitutes man.

Giovanni was pining to prostitute himself, dribbling like a dog, wanting to give himself to a woman. And for money!

Connie looked at Venice far off, low and rose-coloured upon the water.

Built of money, blossomed of money, and dead with money.

The money-deadness! Money, money, money, prostitution and deadness.

You can be as dirty as you like. In fact, the more dirt you do on sex, the better they like it. But if you believe in your own sex, and won’t have it done dirt to: they’ll down you.

It’s the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing.

They won’t have it, and they’ll kill you before they’ll let you have it. You’ll see, they’ll hound that man down. And what’s he done, after all? If he’s made love to his wife all ends on, hasn’t he a right to?

Mrs. Bolton keeps me informed. She reminds me of a fish which, though dumb, seems to be breathing silent gossip through its gills, while ever it lives. All goes through the sieve of her gills, and nothing surprises her.

It is as if the events of other people’s lives were the necessary oxygen of her own.

“She is preoccupied with the Mellors scandal, and if I will let her begin, she takes me down to the depths.

Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air.

I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.

“But sometimes the soul does come up, shoots like a kittiwake into the light, with ecstasy, after having preyed on the submarine depths.

“

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you’re married and her name’s Bertha.

”

Duncan, who had been rather depressingly in love with her ten years ago, was in love with her again. But she said to him:

“I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.”

So Duncan left her alone: really quite pleased to be able to. All the same, he offered her a soft stream of a queer, inverted sort of love. He wanted to be with her.

“

It’s the courage of your own tenderness, that’s what it is: like when you put your hand on my tail and say I’ve got a pretty tail.

”

But even he fought shy of the bodily awareness, and that natural physical tenderness, which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly way. Makes ’em really manly, not so monkeyish! Ay! it’s tenderness, really; it’s cunt-awareness.

Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of.

We’re only half-conscious, and half alive. We’ve got to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It’s our crying need.”

“No!” she said. “Love me! Love me, and say you’ll keep me. Say you’ll keep me! Say you’ll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody.”

She crept close against him, clinging fast to his thin, strong naked body, the only home she had ever known.

“Then I’ll keep thee,” he said. “If tha wants it, then I’ll keep thee.”

“But you’ve put it into me.

Be tender to it, and that will be its future already.

Kiss it!”

One could not.

The far ends of the world are not five minutes from Charing Cross, nowadays.

While the wireless is active, there are no far ends of the earth. Kings of Dahomey and Lamas of Tibet listen in to London and New York.

Patience! Patience!

The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.

Connie confided in her father.

What Sir Malcolm could not bear, was the scandal of his daughter’s having an intrigue with a gamekeeper.

He did not mind the intrigue: he minded the scandal.

“I care nothing about the fellow. He’s evidently been able to get round you all right. But by God, think of all the talk. Think of your stepmother, how she’ll take it!”

“I know! It’s sickening! But what can I do?”

“Contriving, conniving; conniving, contriving! Makes a man think he’s lived too long.”

“Come, Father, if you haven’t done a good deal of contriving and conniving in your time, you may talk.”

“If you’d been in her own class.”

“Or if I’d been in a cage at the Zoo.”

“I think,” said Hilda, “it will be best if she names quite another man as corespondent, and you stay out of it altogether.”

“Well!” he said at last. “I agree to anything.

The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best.

But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.”

He looked in humiliation, anger, weariness and misery at Connie.

“Ma lass!” he said. “The world’s goin’ to put salt on thy tail.”

“Not if we don’t let it,” she said.

“And who is murdered?” asked Hilda, rather coldly and sneeringly.

“Me! It murders all the bowels of compassion in a man.”

A wave of pure hate came out of the artist. He heard the note of dislike in the other man’s voice, and the note of contempt. And he himself loathed the mention of bowels of compassion. Sickly sentiment!

“You didn’t like him, but he’s better than that, really. He’s really kind,” Connie explained as they left.

“He’s a little black pup with a corrugated distemper,” said Mellors.

“No, he wasn’t nice today.”

But he had absolutely refused any outward admission of it. Therefore, outwardly, it came as the most terrible blow and shock to him. He had kept the surface of his confidence in her quite serene.

And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness.

This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.