The Rainbow

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.