Women in Love

But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul,

the extreme, unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to

unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being

gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death,

could never be understood by her. He worshipped her as age worships

youth, he gloried in her, because, in his one grain of faith, he was

young as she, he was her proper mate. This marriage with her was his

resurrection and his life.

All this she could not know. She wanted to be made much of, to be

adored. There were infinite distances of silence between them. How

could he tell her of the immanence of her beauty, that was not form, or

weight, or colour, but something like a strange, golden light! How

could he know himself what her beauty lay in, for him. He said 'Your

nose is beautiful, your chin is adorable.' But it sounded like lies,

and she was disappointed, hurt. Even when he said, whispering with

truth, 'I love you, I love you,' it was not the real truth. It was

something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of

having transcended the old existence. How could he say "I" when he was

something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I, this old formula

of the age, was a dead letter.

In the new, superfine bliss, a peace superseding knowledge, there was

no I and you, there was only the third, unrealised wonder, the wonder

of existing not as oneself, but in a consummation of my being and of

her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the

duality. Nor can I say 'I love you,' when I have ceased to be, and you

have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new

oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer,

all is perfect and at one. Speech travels between the separate parts.

But in the perfect One there is perfect silence of bliss.

They were married by law on the next day, and she did as he bade her,

she wrote to her father and mother. Her mother replied, not her father.

She did not go back to school. She stayed with Birkin in his rooms, or

at the Mill, moving with him as he moved. But she did not see anybody,

save Gudrun and Gerald. She was all strange and wondering as yet, but

relieved as by dawn.