The Rainbow

His senses pricked up and keenly attended to her. She

laughed, perfectly indifferent and loose as he was. He came

towards her. She neither rejected him nor responded to him. In a

kind of radiance, superb in her inscrutability, she laughed

before him. She too could throw everything overboard, love,

intimacy, responsibility. What were her four children to her

now? What did it matter that this man was the father of her four

children?

He was the sensual male seeking his pleasure, she was the

female ready to take hers: but in her own way. A man could turn

into a free lance: so then could a woman. She adhered as little

as he to the moral world. All that had gone before was nothing

to her. She was another woman, under the instance of a strange

man. He was a stranger to her, seeking his own ends. Very good.

She wanted to see what this stranger would do now, what he

was.

She laughed, and kept him at arm's length, whilst apparently

ignoring him. She watched him undress as if he were a stranger.

Indeed he was a stranger to her.

And she roused him profoundly, violently, even before he

touched her. The little creature in Nottingham had but been

leading up to this. They abandoned in one motion the moral

position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple.

Strange his wife was to him. It was as if he were a perfect

stranger, as if she were infinitely and essentially strange to

him, the other half of the world, the dark half of the moon. She

waited for his touch as if he were a marauder who had come in,

infinitely unknown and desirable to her. And he began to

discover her. He had an inkling of the vastness of the unknown

sensual store of delights she was. With a passion of

voluptuousness that made him dwell on each tiny beauty, in a

kind of frenzy of enjoyment, he lit upon her: her beauty, the

beauties, the separate, several beauties of her body.

He was quite ousted from himself, and sensually transported

by that which he discovered in her. He was another man revelling

over her. There was no tenderness, no love between them any

more, only the maddening, sensuous lust for discovery and the

insatiable, exorbitant gratification in the sensual beauties of

her body. And she was a store, a store of absolute beauties that

it drove him to contemplate. There was such a feast to enjoy,

and he with only one man's capacity.

He lived in a passion of sensual discovery with her for some

time--it was a duel: no love, no words, no kisses even,

only the maddening perception of beauty consummate, absolute

through touch. He wanted to touch her, to discover her,

maddeningly he wanted to know her. Yet he must not hurry, or he

missed everything. He must enjoy one beauty at a time. And the

multitudinous beauties of her body, the many little rapturous

places, sent him mad with delight, and with desire to be able to

know more, to have strength to know more. For all was there.