Women in Love

There remained the covert fear and horror of his wife, as she sat

mindless and strange in her room, or as she came forth with slow,

prowling step, her head bent forward. But this he put away. Even his

life-long righteousness, however, would not quite deliver him from the

inner horror. Still, he could keep it sufficiently at bay. It would

never break forth openly. Death would come first.

Then there was Winifred! If only he could be sure about her, if only he

could be sure. Since the death of Diana, and the development of his

illness, his craving for surety with regard to Winifred amounted almost

to obsession. It was as if, even dying, he must have some anxiety, some

responsibility of love, of Charity, upon his heart.

She was an odd, sensitive, inflammable child, having her father's dark

hair and quiet bearing, but being quite detached, momentaneous. She was

like a changeling indeed, as if her feelings did not matter to her,

really. She often seemed to be talking and playing like the gayest and

most childish of children, she was full of the warmest, most delightful

affection for a few things--for her father, and for her animals in

particular. But if she heard that her beloved kitten Leo had been run

over by the motor-car she put her head on one side, and replied, with a

faint contraction like resentment on her face: 'Has he?' Then she took

no more notice. She only disliked the servant who would force bad news

on her, and wanted her to be sorry. She wished not to know, and that

seemed her chief motive. She avoided her mother, and most of the

members of her family. She LOVED her Daddy, because he wanted her

always to be happy, and because he seemed to become young again, and

irresponsible in her presence. She liked Gerald, because he was so

self-contained. She loved people who would make life a game for her.

She had an amazing instinctive critical faculty, and was a pure

anarchist, a pure aristocrat at once. For she accepted her equals

wherever she found them, and she ignored with blithe indifference her

inferiors, whether they were her brothers and sisters, or whether they

were wealthy guests of the house, or whether they were the common

people or the servants. She was quite single and by herself, deriving

from nobody. It was as if she were cut off from all purpose or

continuity, and existed simply moment by moment.

The father, as by some strange final illusion, felt as if all his fate

depended on his ensuring to Winifred her happiness. She who could never

suffer, because she never formed vital connections, she who could lose

the dearest things of her life and be just the same the next day, the

whole memory dropped out, as if deliberately, she whose will was so

strangely and easily free, anarchistic, almost nihilistic, who like a

soulless bird flits on its own will, without attachment or

responsibility beyond the moment, who in her every motion snapped the

threads of serious relationship with blithe, free hands, really

nihilistic, because never troubled, she must be the object of her

father's final passionate solicitude.