Women in Love

'No--?' he said, pondering.

'It doesn't matter, does it?' she said.

'Yes,' he replied. 'Their imaginations shall not work on us. I'll post

yours here, mine after. I cannot be implicated in their imaginings.' He looked at her with his strange, non-human singleness.

'Yes, you are right,' she said.

She lifted her face to him, all shining and open. It was as if he might

enter straight into the source of her radiance. His face became a

little distracted.

'Shall we go?' he said.

'As you like,' she replied.

They were soon out of the little town, and running through the uneven

lanes of the country. Ursula nestled near him, into his constant

warmth, and watched the pale-lit revelation racing ahead, the visible

night. Sometimes it was a wide old road, with grass-spaces on either

side, flying magic and elfin in the greenish illumination, sometimes it

was trees looming overhead, sometimes it was bramble bushes, sometimes

the walls of a crew-yard and the butt of a barn.

'Are you going to Shortlands to dinner?' Ursula asked him suddenly. He

started.

'Good God!' he said. 'Shortlands! Never again. Not that. Besides we

should be too late.' 'Where are we going then--to the Mill?' 'If you like. Pity to go anywhere on this good dark night. Pity to come

out of it, really. Pity we can't stop in the good darkness. It is

better than anything ever would be--this good immediate darkness.' She sat wondering. The car lurched and swayed. She knew there was no

leaving him, the darkness held them both and contained them, it was not

to be surpassed Besides she had a full mystic knowledge of his suave

loins of darkness, dark-clad and suave, and in this knowledge there was

some of the inevitability and the beauty of fate, fate which one asks

for, which one accepts in full.

He sat still like an Egyptian Pharoah, driving the car. He felt as if

he were seated in immemorial potency, like the great carven statues of

real Egypt, as real and as fulfilled with subtle strength, as these

are, with a vague inscrutable smile on the lips. He knew what it was to

have the strange and magical current of force in his back and loins,

and down his legs, force so perfect that it stayed him immobile, and

left his face subtly, mindlessly smiling. He knew what it was to be

awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind.

And from this source he had a pure and magic control, magical,

mystical, a force in darkness, like electricity.