Who's going to force me into loving or pretending to love them, working up
the sex game?'
`No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?'
`You may feel it, I don't.'
`Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no
glamour for a man any more.'
`Has a man for a woman?'
She pondered the other side of the question.
`Not much,' she said truthfully.
`Then let's leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like
proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial
sex-compulsion! I refuse it!'
Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn,
so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was the
point, of her or anything?
It was her youth which rebelled. These men seemed so old and cold.
Everything seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one down so; he was no
good. The men didn't want one; they just didn't really want a woman, even
Michaelis didn't.
And the bounders who pretended they did, and started working the sex
game, they were worse than ever.
It was just dismal, and one had to put up with it. It was quite true,
men had no real glamour for a woman: if you could fool yourself into
thinking they had, even as she had fooled herself over Michaelis, that was
the best you could do. Meanwhile you just lived on and there was nothing to
it. She understood perfectly well why people had cocktail parties, and
jazzed, and Charlestoned till they were ready to drop. You had to take it
out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But what a ghastly
thing, this youth! You felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the thing fizzed
somehow, and didn't let you be comfortable. A mean sort of life! And no
prospect! She almost wished she had gone off with Mick, and made her life
one long cocktail party, and jazz evening. Anyhow that was better than just
mooning yourself into the grave.
On one of her bad days she went out alone to walk in the wood,
ponderously, heeding nothing, not even noticing where she was. The report of
a gun not far off startled and angered her.
Then, as she went, she heard voices, and recoiled. People! She didn't
want people. But her quick ear caught another sound, and she roused; it was
a child sobbing. At once she attended; someone was ill-treating a child. She
strode swinging down the wet drive, her sullen resentment uppermost. She
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>