Women in Love

'All right,' he said, 'then let us not have it. I'm sick of it all,

too. At any rate one can't go on living on the old bones of beauty.' 'One can't,' she cried. 'I DON'T want old things.' 'The truth is, we don't want things at all,' he replied. 'The thought

of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me.' This startled her for a moment. Then she replied: 'So it is to me. But one must live somewhere.' 'Not somewhere--anywhere,' he said. 'One should just live anywhere--not

have a definite place. I don't want a definite place. As soon as you

get a room, and it is COMPLETE, you want to run from it. Now my rooms

at the Mill are quite complete, I want them at the bottom of the sea.

It is a horrible tyranny of a fixed milieu, where each piece of

furniture is a commandment-stone.' She clung to his arm as they walked away from the market.

'But what are we going to do?' she said. 'We must live somehow. And I

do want some beauty in my surroundings. I want a sort of natural

GRANDEUR even, SPLENDOUR.' 'You'll never get it in houses and furniture--or even clothes. Houses

and furniture and clothes, they are all terms of an old base world, a

detestable society of man. And if you have a Tudor house and old,

beautiful furniture, it is only the past perpetuated on top of you,

horrible. And if you have a perfect modern house done for you by

Poiret, it is something else perpetuated on top of you. It is all

horrible. It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning

you into a generalisation. You have to be like Rodin, Michelangelo, and

leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure. You must leave

your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained,

never confined, never dominated from the outside.' She stood in the street contemplating.

'And we are never to have a complete place of our own--never a home?'

she said.

'Pray God, in this world, no,' he answered.

'But there's only this world,' she objected.

He spread out his hands with a gesture of indifference.

'Meanwhile, then, we'll avoid having things of our own,' he said.

'But you've just bought a chair,' she said.

'I can tell the man I don't want it,' he replied.

She pondered again. Then a queer little movement twitched her face.

'No,' she said, 'we don't want it. I'm sick of old things.' 'New ones as well,' he said.