Women in Love

Apart from these stories, they never talked of the future. They

delighted most either in mocking imaginations of destruction, or in

sentimental, fine marionette-shows of the past. It was a sentimental

delight to reconstruct the world of Goethe at Weimar, or of Schiller

and poverty and faithful love, or to see again Jean Jacques in his

quakings, or Voltaire at Ferney, or Frederick the Great reading his own

poetry.

They talked together for hours, of literature and sculpture and

painting, amusing themselves with Flaxman and Blake and Fuseli, with

tenderness, and with Feuerbach and Bocklin. It would take them a

life-time, they felt to live again, IN PETTO, the lives of the great

artists. But they preferred to stay in the eighteenth and the

nineteenth centuries.

They talked in a mixture of languages. The ground-work was French, in

either case. But he ended most of his sentences in a stumble of English

and a conclusion of German, she skilfully wove herself to her end in

whatever phrase came to her. She took a peculiar delight in this

conversation. It was full of odd, fantastic expression, of double

meanings, of evasions, of suggestive vagueness. It was a real physical

pleasure to her to make this thread of conversation out of the

different-coloured stands of three languages.

And all the while they two were hovering, hesitating round the flame of

some invisible declaration. He wanted it, but was held back by some

inevitable reluctance. She wanted it also, but she wanted to put it

off, to put it off indefinitely, she still had some pity for Gerald,

some connection with him. And the most fatal of all, she had the

reminiscent sentimental compassion for herself in connection with him.

Because of what HAD been, she felt herself held to him by immortal,

invisible threads-because of what HAD been, because of his coming to

her that first night, into her own house, in his extremity, because-Gerald was gradually overcome with a revulsion of loathing for Loerke.

He did not take the man seriously, he despised him merely, except as he

felt in Gudrun's veins the influence of the little creature. It was

this that drove Gerald wild, the feeling in Gudrun's veins of Loerke's

presence, Loerke's being, flowing dominant through her.

'What makes you so smitten with that little vermin?' he asked, really

puzzled. For he, man-like, could not see anything attractive or

important AT ALL in Loerke. Gerald expected to find some handsomeness

or nobleness, to account for a woman's subjection. But he saw none

here, only an insect-like repulsiveness.

Gudrun flushed deeply. It was these attacks she would never forgive.