Women in Love

He remained only a few minutes longer, then took his leave. When he was

gone Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain

seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature

seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could

not imagine what it was. It merely took hold of her, the most poignant

and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought. She could not

think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself. It was like a

possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several days she went

about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It

surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her

out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old

life held good. She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own

life.

It was so completely incomprehensible and irrational. She did not know

WHY she hated him, her hate was quite abstract. She had only realised

with a shock that stunned her, that she was overcome by this pure

transportation. He was the enemy, fine as a diamond, and as hard and

jewel-like, the quintessence of all that was inimical.

She thought of his face, white and purely wrought, and of his eyes that

had such a dark, constant will of assertion, and she touched her own

forehead, to feel if she were mad, she was so transfigured in white

flame of essential hate.

It was not temporal, her hatred, she did not hate him for this or for

that; she did not want to do anything to him, to have any connection

with him. Her relation was ultimate and utterly beyond words, the hate

was so pure and gemlike. It was as if he were a beam of essential

enmity, a beam of light that did not only destroy her, but denied her

altogether, revoked her whole world. She saw him as a clear stroke of

uttermost contradiction, a strange gem-like being whose existence

defined her own non-existence. When she heard he was ill again, her

hatred only intensified itself a few degrees, if that were possible. It

stunned her and annihilated her, but she could not escape it. She could

not escape this transfiguration of hatred that had come upon her.