In the shed they played at kisses, really played at kisses.
It was a delicious, exciting game. She turned to him, her face
all laughing, like a challenge. And he accepted the challenge at
once. He twined his hand full of her hair, and gently, with his
hand wrapped round with hair behind her head, gradually brought
her face nearer to his, whilst she laughed breathless with
challenge, and his eyes gleamed with answer, with enjoyment of
the game. And he kissed her, asserting his will over her, and
she kissed him back, asserting her deliberate enjoyment of him.
Daring and reckless and dangerous they knew it was, their game,
each playing with fire, not with love. A sort of defiance of all
the world possessed her in it--she would kiss him just
because she wanted to. And a dare-devilry in him, like a
cynicism, a cut at everything he pretended to serve, retaliated
in him.
She was very beautiful then, so wide opened, so radiant, so
palpitating, exquisitely vulnerable and poignantly, wrongly,
throwing herself to risk. It roused a sort of madness in him.
Like a flower shaking and wide-opened in the sun, she tempted
him and challenged him, and he accepted the challenge, something
went fixed in him. And under all her laughing, poignant
recklessness was the quiver of tears. That almost sent him mad,
mad with desire, with pain, whose only issue was through
possession of her body.
So, shaken, afraid, they went back to her parents in the
kitchen, and dissimulated. But something was roused in both of
them that they could not now allay. It intensified and
heightened their senses, they were more vivid, and powerful in
their being. But under it all was a poignant sense of
transience. It was a magnificent self-assertion on the part of
both of them, he asserted himself before her, he felt himself
infinitely male and infinitely irresistible, she asserted
herself before him, she knew herself infinitely desirable, and
hence infinitely strong. And after all, what could either of
them get from such a passion but a sense of his or of her own
maximum self, in contradistinction to all the rest of life?
Wherein was something finite and sad, for the human soul at its
maximum wants a sense of the infinite.
Nevertheless, it was begun now, this passion, and must go on,
the passion of Ursula to know her own maximum self, limited and
so defined against him. She could limit and define herself
against him, the male, she could be her maximum self, female, oh
female, triumphant for one moment in exquisite assertion against
the male, in supreme contradistinction to the male.
The next afternoon, when he came, prowling, she went with him
across to the church. Her father was gradually gathering in
anger against him, her mother was hardening in anger against
her. But the parents were naturally tolerant in action.