He avoided the question. `All the darned women are like that,' he said.
`Either they don't go off at all, as if they were dead in there...or else
they wait till a chap's really done, and then they start in to bring
themselves off, and a chap's got to hang on. I never had a woman yet who
went off just at the same moment as I did.'
Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine information. She
was only stunned by his feeling against her...his incomprehensible
brutality. She felt so innocent.
`But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don't you?' she repeated.
`Oh, all right! I'm quite willing. But I'm darned if hanging on waiting
for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man...'
This speech was one of the crucial blows of Connie's life. It killed
something in her. She had not been so very keen on Michaelis; till he
started it, she did not want him. It was as if she never positively wanted
him. But once he had started her, it seemed only natural for her to come to
her own crisis with him. Almost she had loved him for it...almost that night
she loved him, and wanted to marry him.
Perhaps instinctively he knew it, and that was why he had to bring down
the whole show with a smash; the house of cards. Her whole sexual feeling
for him, or for any man, collapsed that night. Her life fell apart from his
as completely as if he had never existed.
And she went through the days drearily. There was nothing now but this
empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living
together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with
one another.
Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the
one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make
up the grand sum-total of nothingness!
Chapter 6
`Why don't men and women really like one another nowadays?' Connie
asked Tommy Dukes, who was more or less her oracle.
`Oh, but they do! I don't think since the human species was invented,
there has ever been a time when men and women have liked one another as much
as they do today. Genuine liking! Take myself. I really like women better
than men; they are braver, one can be more frank with them.'
Connie pondered this.
`Ah, yes, but you never have anything to do with them!' she said.
`I? What am I doing but talking perfectly sincerely to a woman at this
moment?'
`Yes, talking...'
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