best at this time, and was almost happy in his strange blind way. He really
reaped the fruits of the sensual satisfaction she got out of Michaelis' male
passivity erect inside her. But of course he never knew it, and if he had,
he wouldn't have said thank you!
Yet when those days of her grand joyful cheerfulness and stimulus were
gone, quite gone, and she was depressed and irritable, how Clifford longed
for them again! Perhaps if he'd known he might even have wished to get her
and Michaelis together again.
Chapter 4
Connie always had a foreboding of the hopelessness of her affair with
Mick, as people called him. Yet other men seemed to mean nothing to her. She
was attached to Clifford. He wanted a good deal of her life and she gave it
to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of a man, and this Clifford
did not give her; could not. There were occasional spasms of Michaelis. But,
as she knew by foreboding, that would come to an end. Mick couldn't keep
anything up. It was part of his very being that he must break off any
connexion, and be loose, isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was his
major necessity, even though he always said: She turned me down!
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down
to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the
sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if
you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good
fish in the sea.
Clifford was making strides into fame, and even money. People came to
see him. Connie nearly always had somebody at Wragby. But if they weren't
mackerel they were herring, with an occasional cat-fish, or conger-eel.
There were a few regular men, constants; men who had been at Cambridge
with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had remained in the army, and was
a Brigadier-General. `The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from
having to face the battle of life,' he said.
There was Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about
stars. There was Hammond, another writer. All were about the same age as
Clifford; the young intellectuals of the day. They all believed in the life
of the mind. What you did apart from that was your private affair, and
didn't much matter. No one thinks of inquiring of another person at what
hour he retires to the privy. It isn't interesting to anyone but the person
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