want to marry. I know it would be the best thing for me...marry and lead a
regular life. I lead the deuce of a life, simply tearing myself to pieces.
Look here, you and I, we're made for one another...hand and glove. Why don't
we marry? Do you see any reason why we shouldn't?'
Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing. These men, they
were all alike, they left everything out. They just went off from the top of
their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried
heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.
`But I am married already,' she said. `I can't leave Clifford, you
know.'
`Why not? but why not?' he cried. `He'll hardly know you've gone, after
six months. He doesn't know that anybody exists, except himself. Why the man
has no use for you at all, as far as I can see; he's entirely wrapped up in
himself.'
Connie felt there was truth in this. But she also felt that Mick was
hardly making a display of selflessness.
`Aren't all men wrapped up in themselves?' she asked.
`Oh, more or less, I allow. A man's got to be, to get through. But
that's not the point. The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a
woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he? If he can't he's no
right to the woman...' He paused and gazed at her with his full, hazel eyes,
almost hypnotic. `Now I consider,' he added, `I can give a woman the
darndest good time she can ask for. I think I can guarantee myself.'
`And what sort of a good time?' asked Connie, gazing on him still with
a sort of amazement, that looked like thrill; and underneath feeling nothing
at all.
`Every sort of a good time, damn it, every sort! Dress, jewels up to a
point, any nightclub you like, know anybody you want to know, live the
pace...travel and be somebody wherever you go...Darn it, every sort of good
time.'
He spoke it almost in a brilliancy of triumph, and Connie looked at him
as if dazzled, and really feeling nothing at all. Hardly even the surface of
her mind was tickled at the glowing prospects he offered her. Hardly even
her most outside self responded, that at any other time would have been
thrilled. She just got no feeling from it, she couldn't `go off'. She just
sat and stared and looked dazzled, and felt nothing, only somewhere she
smelt the extraordinarily unpleasant smell of the bitch-goddess.
Mick sat on tenterhooks, leaning forward in his chair, glaring at her
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