'What is it then?' Hermione was slow and level.
'He wants me really to accept him in marriage.'
Hermione was silent for some time, watching Ursula with slow, pensive
eyes.
'Does he?' she said at length, without expression. Then, rousing, 'And
what is it you don't want? You don't want marriage?'
'No--I don't--not really. I don't want to give the sort of SUBMISSION
he insists on. He wants me to give myself up--and I simply don't feel
that I CAN do it.'
Again there was a long pause, before Hermione replied:
'Not if you don't want to.' Then again there was silence. Hermione
shuddered with a strange desire. Ah, if only he had asked HER to
subserve him, to be his slave! She shuddered with desire.
'You see I can't--'
'But exactly in what does--'
They had both begun at once, they both stopped. Then, Hermione,
assuming priority of speech, resumed as if wearily:
'To what does he want you to submit?'
'He says he wants me to accept him non-emotionally, and finally--I
really don't know what he means. He says he wants the demon part of
himself to be mated--physically--not the human being. You see he says
one thing one day, and another the next--and he always contradicts
himself--'
'And always thinks about himself, and his own dissatisfaction,' said
Hermione slowly.
'Yes,' cried Ursula. 'As if there were no-one but himself concerned.
That makes it so impossible.'
But immediately she began to retract.
'He insists on my accepting God knows what in HIM,' she resumed. 'He
wants me to accept HIM as--as an absolute--But it seems to me he
doesn't want to GIVE anything. He doesn't want real warm intimacy--he
won't have it--he rejects it. He won't let me think, really, and he
won't let me FEEL--he hates feelings.'
There was a long pause, bitter for Hermione. Ah, if only he would have
made this demand of her? Her he DROVE into thought, drove inexorably
into knowledge--and then execrated her for it.
'He wants me to sink myself,' Ursula resumed, 'not to have any being of
my own--'
'Then why doesn't he marry an odalisk?' said Hermione in her mild
sing-song, 'if it is that he wants.' Her long face looked sardonic and
amused.
'Yes,' said Ursula vaguely. After all, the tiresome thing was, he did
not want an odalisk, he did not want a slave. Hermione would have been
his slave--there was in her a horrible desire to prostrate herself
before a man--a man who worshipped her, however, and admitted her as
the supreme thing. He did not want an odalisk. He wanted a woman to
TAKE something from him, to give herself up so much that she could take
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>