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Ursula listened, half attentive, half avoiding what he said. She seemed to catch the drift of his statement, and then she drew away. She wanted to hear, but she did not want to be implicated. She was reluctant to yield there, where he wanted her, to yield as it were, her very identity.

“Why should love be like sleep?” she asked sadly.

“I don’t know. So that it is like death—I do want to die from this life—and yet it is more than life itself. One is delivered over like a naked infant from the womb, all the old defences and the old body gone, and new air around one, that has never been breathed before.”

She listened, making out what he said. She knew, as well as he knew, that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a dumb show like any other. And she seemed to feel his gesture through her blood, and she drew back, even though her desire sent her forward.

“But,” she said gravely, “didn’t you say you wanted something that was not love—something beyond love?”

He turned in confusion. There was always confusion in speech. Yet it must be spoken. Which ever way one moved, if one were to move forwards, one must break a way through. And to know, to give utterance, was to break a way through the walls of the prison as the infant in labour strives through the walls of the womb. There is no new movement now, without the breaking through of the old body, deliberately, in knowledge, in the struggle to get out.

“I don’t want love,” he said. “I don’t want to know you. I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we are found different. One shouldn’t talk when one is tired and wretched. One Hamletises, and it seems a lie. Only believe me when I show you a bit of healthy pride and insouciance. I hate myself serious.”

“Why shouldn’t you be serious?” she said.

He thought for a minute, then he said, sulkily:

“I don’t know.” Then they walked on in silence, at outs. He was vague and lost.

“Isn’t it strange,” she said, suddenly putting her hand on his arm, with a loving impulse, “how we always talk like this! I suppose we do love each other, in some way.”

“Oh yes,” he said; “too much.”

She laughed almost gaily.

“You’d have to have it your own way, wouldn’t you?” she teased. “You could never take it on trust.”

He changed, laughed softly, and turned and took her in his arms, in the middle of the road.

“Yes,” he said softly.

And he kissed her face and brow, slowly, gently, with a sort of delicate happiness which surprised her extremely, and to which she could not respond. They were soft, blind kisses, perfect in their stillness. Yet she held back from them. It was like strange moths, very soft and silent, settling on her from the darkness of her soul. She was uneasy. She drew away.

“Isn’t somebody coming?” she said.

So they looked down the dark road, then set off again walking towards Beldover. Then suddenly, to show him she was no shallow prude, she stopped and held him tight, hard against her, and covered his face with hard, fierce kisses of passion. In spite of his otherness, the old blood beat up in him.

“Not this, not this,” he whimpered to himself, as the first perfect mood of softness and sleep-loveliness ebbed back away from the rushing of passion that came up to his limbs and over his face as she drew him. And soon he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her. Yet in the small core of the flame was an unyielding anguish of another thing. But this also was lost; he only wanted her, with an extreme desire that seemed inevitable as death, beyond question.

Then, satisfied and shattered, fulfilled and destroyed, he went home away from her, drifting vaguely through the darkness, lapsed into the old fire of burning passion. Far away, far away, there seemed to be a small lament in the darkness. But what did it matter? What did it matter, what did anything matter save this ultimate and triumphant experience of physical passion, that had blazed up anew like a new spell of life. “I was becoming quite dead-alive, nothing but a word-bag,