Women in Love

So she withdrew away from Gudrun and from that which she stood for, she

turned in spirit towards Birkin again. She had not seen him since the

fiasco of his proposal. She did not want to, because she did not want

the question of her acceptance thrust upon her. She knew what Birkin

meant when he asked her to marry him; vaguely, without putting it into

speech, she knew. She knew what kind of love, what kind of surrender he

wanted. And she was not at all sure that this was the kind of love that

she herself wanted. She was not at all sure that it was this mutual

unison in separateness that she wanted. She wanted unspeakable

intimacies. She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her

own, oh, so unspeakably, in intimacy. To drink him down--ah, like a

life-draught. She made great professions, to herself, of her

willingness to warm his foot-soles between her breasts, after the

fashion of the nauseous Meredith poem. But only on condition that he,

her lover, loved her absolutely, with complete self-abandon. And subtly

enough, she knew he would never abandon himself FINALLY to her. He did

not believe in final self-abandonment. He said it openly. It was his

challenge. She was prepared to fight him for it. For she believed in an

absolute surrender to love. She believed that love far surpassed the

individual. He said the individual was MORE than love, or than any

relationship. For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of

its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium. She believed that

love was EVERYTHING. Man must render himself up to her. He must be

quaffed to the dregs by her. Let him be HER MAN utterly, and she in

return would be his humble slave--whether she wanted it or not.